


ExSol

by Certeis



Category: Original Work
Genre: BDSM, Bondage, F/F, F/M, Gay, Gen, Lesbian, M/M, MECH, Multi, Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sci-Fi, Transgender, non-binary, queer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-05-12 02:15:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19219531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Certeis/pseuds/Certeis
Summary: Cut off from Earth, "Extrasolars" eke out an existence on the ruins of a long-dead alien civilization, utilizing and repurposing their technology as much as they struggle against it.  Being away from Earth does not stop humanity from falling in love, and plotting against one another though...





	1. Chapter 1

Nina watched the line of four-legged walker robots scuttle into position behind a worn-down hill.  The same hill that had periodically hosted squadrons of such machines for weeks now. The hill was the ideal location to launch missiles against a nearby structure, which Nina also kept an idle eye upon.  What purpose the grand metallic structure had once served was anybody’s guess, every bit as much as it was anybody’s guess how many thousands of years ago it had served that purpose. The last of the robots reached its destination, slowly settling into place, and there was a moment of silence.

 

Nina took a bite of her protein bar and started to count.  The last few dozen times it had taken them twenty five seconds to come up with a firing solution.  The bar tasted like dirt, more like dirt than it was supposed to. She scowled in annoyance and stuffed it back into one of the little compartments in her rover and clicked her tongue to activate voice commands.

 

“Call Nugan,” She commanded.

 

“Nina I'm busy you-” a crackly, impatient voice came through the rover’s speakers after a very brief delay.

 

“Oi! Nugan you shifty little shrew, you told me the protein combiner was fixed!” she shouted over his whiny voice.

 

“I did!  ...I mean, it is.  Fixed it last night.”  Nugan answered with only the barest hint of conviction.

 

“Lies.”

 

“No, I-”

 

“Lies!!”

 

The line went dead as Nugan cut the connection.  Nina clicked her tongue to reactivate voice commands again but before she could call Nugan back to yell at him some more, a flurry of motion from the foot of the hill caught her attention.  Two dozen missiles streaked away from the hunched squadron of robots, arcing through the air and flying straight into a hail of fire from the fortress’ anti-missile defenses.

 

“Playback recording in forty five minutes,” she muttered at the rover’s computer.  It beeped at her in response, prompting her to record her message. “Make sure ‘rina knows Nugan is useless.”  The computer beeped again, acknowledging that her request would be followed.

 

The remnants of the precursor's society, the machines that were currently killing each other,  were typically divided into four factions. Before they had reawakened and resumed their war where they had presumably left off, Earth Coalition had their own names for them, based upon some kind of structural analysis of where their strongholds were located along the gateway network.  ExSol society just called them based by what their logos looked like, Talon, Cat, River, and Eye. Talon was the dominant faction on the planet, and it was Talon's fortress currently under siege by River’s missile launchers.

 

Several missiles detonated against the walls and outer periphery of the fortress, filling the air with roaring percussion even from all the way over where Nina was.  A hangar on the ground floor of the fortress opened, and about thirty intercept craft poured out, racing towards the robots attacking their base of operations. The vehicles, designated ‘Locusts,’ were basically just cannons mounted to crummy anti-grav engines that suspended them a few feet off the ground.  They zipped along the ground, taking a roundabout route that passed very near Nina’s own rover. The sound of their engines roared to a crescendo as they passed not much more than ten meters away. She knew their scanners detected her, and that Talon would be aware of her presence, in much the same way that that the fortress was aware of the strange tree-like flora that grew all around it.  Which was to say, it couldn’t care less so long as she didn’t get in their way.

 

The squadron of thirty Locusts descended upon the group of walkers just as they fired a second barrage of missiles at the fortress.  The unwieldy walker robots tried to turn around to face their attackers, bringing the small autocannons mounted into their egg-shaped torsos to bear against their agile attackers.  As had been the case for months, they were easy prey. The Locusts nimbly avoided the walker robots’ awkward attempts to bring their guns to bear, while their plasma casters tore superheated holes in them in turn.

 

In a matter of minutes, the twelve artillery walkers were all either disabled or totally scrapped, and the remains of the fortress’ interception force started to peel away and return back to their hangar.  Nina’s hands went to her rover’s controls, and she started the vehicle up, heading towards the remains of the artillery walkers. The fortress would dispatch a team to start scavenging the remains of the walker robots, as would the factory that sent them.  There would be about a twenty minute window before they both arrived and clashed once again, and Nina had every intention of making the utmost use of that time.

 

Her rover tore up the sand and dirt as it brought her to the site of the battle. Nina’s practiced driving brought her around a pair of scrapped walker robots.  A melted hole in the side of one had detonated the artillery piece’s ordnance and the resulting blast had triggered a chain reaction that had taken down the one next to it. The resulting mess was two utterly useless unsalvageable hunks of molten metal that she had no interest it, and so she went in deeper to the site of the battle looking for something better.

 

She spotted a walker robot with its two front legs melted off, and a small but well-placed hole burned right through the control module far off to her left.  She immediately swerved her rover around and drove towards it like a madwoman, spinning her wheels at the last minute to do a 180 degree spin. The rover squealed and protested and the centrifugal force made her stomach lurch but she cued the breaks and came to a stop with her cargo bed facing the downed machine.  Nina grabbed her plasma cutter and welding mask off of the passenger seat of the rover and hopped out onto the scorched dirt below. Her heavy boots cruched against some partially glassed sand and she only took a brief moment to maintain her footing before jogging over to the fallen robot to inspect it.

 

There were several armor plates that had come loose but were mostly intact that she could probably pry free and use just for the titanium, steel and carbon that would be contained within, but those materials weren’t especially difficult to find, and certainly weren’t worth Nina risking her life for.  Insead she spotted a missile rack mounted upon the robot’s back, the firing port jammed half open by a fragment of metal from some other machine. The fuel inside those missiles, that’s what she was after, and the explosive payloads weren’t useless either. Nina cracked her knuckles and started to climb, finding hand and footholds in the robot’s shredded armor and strange, alien joints.  She ascended the fallen robot and got up onto its sloped back. She moved in a crouch, keeping her center of gravity low on the angled, unsteady terrain as she approached the jammed missile port. Her plasma cutter came out, her welding mask went down, and she started quickly shearing off small bits of metal and machinery away from the edge of the missile rack to get it all the way open. She worked quickly but carefully, not interested in hitting the warhead of the missiles directly with the small stream of magnetically bottled plasma and accidentally detonating them.

 

The port came open, and then a few small cuts later, she sheared the entire missile rack free of its port.  She grunted and started to remove some of the missiles, they were relatively small projectiles, maybe a meter and a half long, slender and not too heavy.  She carefully grabbed three at a time and went down to her rover, piling them into the back until she had all twelve of them. As she strapped them tightly into the cargo bed of her rover, she heard the grinding sound of treads ripping up the coarse earth.  She looked over her shoulder and saw a small convoy of five reclamation machines getting closer, coming to start salvaging the raw materials from this skirmish on a scale that she herself couldn’t ever manage.

 

“Bereaver’s tits,” Nina cursed to herself and vaulted back into her rover, tossing her cutting equipment back into its proper location on her passenger seat and starting the engine.  Tires screeched and crunched as the vehicle lurched into motion. She drove at a ninety degree angle away from where the other convoy of salvage machines would be approaching from. She drove up a hill, her vehicle groaning in protest as it struggled against both gravity and how hard Nina was trying to push it.  As she crested the rise, she allowed herself one single glance over her shoulder to see if part of the convoy had broken off to pursue her.

 

A small treaded vehicle had broken off from the pack and was cruising up the hill directly at her.  These particular vehicles were called Widows, and were known to chase down small human vehicles to extract their materials, and occasionally even killing humans for the same reason.  She barely registered the pursuit before a turret mounted on the side of the Widow fired out a stream of dark red web-like filaments that expanded outwards in the air and descended towards her rover.  Nina swerved off to the side in a panic as the red web descended upon her and narrowly missed. That stuff was a chemical adhesive and if it got in her wheels she’d be spun out and immobilized almost instantly.  If it weren’t mortally dangerous, it would almost be funny that Nina had much more to fear from a machine designed to gather resources than she did from one designed for combat.

 

Nina got out of sight from the Widow as she went over the edge of the hill and started racing down a slight decline.  She might not be able to outrun the advanced alien vehicle in an extended chase, but if she got far enough away then the machine’s calculation of how much the raw material was worth its time to chase down would get worse and worse, and eventually it would give up.  It reached the top of the hill only a few seconds after she did, the treads allowing it to smoothly but swiftly crawl up over the lip where her own rover had crashed and bounced around like popcorn kernels over a fire.

 

The Widow aimed and fired again, casting another wide web of sticky red filaments at her.  She spared a glance over her shoulder again to try and gauge where it was aiming, and swerved to the left this time.  Her rover jerked to a stop, sliding and skidding across the dirt as the adhesive stuck to the outside of the cabin, draped itself across her wheels, and jammed up the mechanism.  The resulting jolt slammed Nina’s ribs against her steering wheel and she groaned in pain as dizzying lights flashed before her eyes and consciousness almost slipped away for a brief moment.  

 

The Widow rolled steadily closer to her rover, the sound of dirt grinding beneath the treads, the sound of Nina’s own death growing louder and louder as she groggily reached for her plasma cutter to maybe try and cut off the rover’s door.  With luck, she could make some distance and the alien machine would salvage the missiles and the materials from the rover and not the water and minerals from Nina herself. Before she could ignite the tool to start cutting her way out, a series of three consecutive cracks drew her attention through the window.  She saw sparks flying and the Widow lurched slightly off to the side, spinning to face its attacker.

 

“Ugh.  Why her,” Nina muttered to herself, almost wishing that the Widow would just disassemble her into her constituent parts so that she wouldn’t have to talk to the pilot of the Mech that was currently rescuing her.

 

The strange-looking tripedal craft was called Twinshya and Nina was very familiar with it, being one of its main mechanics.  Twinshya’s body was sleek, elongated, and close to the ground. It had two legs in front and one in the back which gave it a sort of a strange jolting gait and a twisting, undulating movement when it turned.  Near the back of the body, the pilot seat curved forwards and up in a way that resembled a scorpion’s tail. Nina had always hated that Twinshya looked kind of like a scorpion but didn’t have a scorpion-themed name.  Totally wasted opportunity.

 

It loped up a bit closer to Nina’s rover and turned, facing its sides towards the Widow and fired all three of the autocannons mounted along its body there.  The weapons cracked in rapid succession, tearing bits of armor off the Widow and making it reel backwards once again. Widows were well-armored armored vehicles but didn’t have much in the way of offensive capabilities.  This one fired a pair of small plasma casters at Twinshya. The superheated matter streaked towards it but as it got close it was pushed off to the side by Twinshya’s deflectors before they could burn holes in the Mech’s patchwork of armor.  Even though Twinshya was a rag-tag machine that was basically held together by Nina’s spot welds, it was still an Ascension Mech, and it had access to technology that was unable to run on an autonomous craft.

 

Suddenly, Twinshya twitched a little, and a red glow suffused through it, seeping out from cracks and joints in the machine’s armor.  The Mech’s pilot reoriented it, facing the primary railgun directly at the Widow as the machine shifted into offense mode. The cannon fired, and the hyper-accelerated slug ripped a hole straight through the Widow, the friction and diffusion of heat from the projectile melting and slagging the machine in an instant.

 

Her Rover’s computer beeped as it received an incoming connection request, and she was sure to get her very loud and pained groan out of the way before the computer started sending audio back.

 

“Ay, thanks for savin’ my bacon, Carrina,” Nina answered cheerfully.

 

“By the Archangel, Nina, what are you even doing out here?” Carrina’s voice replied with an exasperated and patronizing sigh.

 

“Scavvin.  I got twelve undetted missiles in my—”

 

“Make sure ‘rina knows Nugan is useless,” Nina’s own pre-recorded message interrupted her explanation.  There was a moment of awkward silence as Nina tried not to snicker at the situation. Carrina had no sense of humour at all, she’d just get annoyed.

 

“Scavenging like a reckless idiot if you’re getting chased by a Widow,” Carrina replied, ignoring the interruption.  “Cut that crap off your rover and lets get out of here in case more come, Call for help if you need it, I’m Counter-Pulsing in thirty.”

 

“Yes’m,” Nina replied with all the fake saccharinity she could muster, and killed the connection.  Twinshya’s red lights went off, shifting the Mech into defence mode and also cutting off Carrina’s ability to talk for a few minutes.  Twinshya circled Nina’s stranded rover for a good thirty minutes watching for more pursuit while she cut her own door off and then started melting and cutting away the adhesive that had immobilized her.  She got the rover moving again without further interest from the robots, not that any scav team would be a real issue for Twinshya. She drove off towards their camp and Twinshya followed along beside her at a pace that was more than leisurely for the Mech even if Nina was moving about as fast as was safe.

 

They travelled in silence through the foothills that lead towards their camp, the dirt roads and paths carved through the vegetation ages ago and maintained by the repeated press of wheels and treads and, in Twinshya’s case, metal legs.  Nina really wanted to mute and refuse incoming voice connections but she knew it would only be a symbolic gesture. Carrina had an administrative override on their internal network and could easily force a connection through any block Nina could put up outside of melting her speakers into a useless pile of scrap with her plasma cutter.  After the third long glance, she tucked the cutting tool away and out of sight so as to remove the temptation.

 

“So what’s the problem with Nugan?” As expected, Carrina’s administrative override forced the connection.

 

Nina winced, her stomach turning at Carrina’s condescending attempt to bond with her.  Still, she knew it wouldn’t fly to be rude when Carrina was trying to be nice, especially about something she was planning to talk to Carrina about anyway.

 

“Tol’ me he fixed the protein combiner.  Lied. Still busted. The piking shrew-face is gonna toss his work on my back  _ again _ .” Nina muttered.

 

There was an extended silence, and eventually the speaker crackled back to life with her answer.  “I’ll talk to Sam about it.”

 

‘Talking to Sam about it’ was code and it meant nothing would change.  Nina rolled her eyes and didn’t press the issue, she was about to be in enough hot water with the entire camp as it was.  They wound their way up the side of what qualified as a mountain on this planet. Their camp was built in the ruined husk of a Post-Connection observatory so it was situated on the highest point on the continent.  The camp itself was a mix of hastily refurbished and addended sections of the old structure and ruined, overgrown sections.

 

Twinshya finally left her side, striding off towards its hangar where Nina herself would probably re-arm the autocannons, load in a new railgun slug, and patch up and dings in the armour later that night.  Nina drove the rover over to their garage, backing it up into the charge port so that she could unload the missiles strapped into her cargo bed a little easier. A boy who was technically Nina’s apprentice and also far too big for his age, Ryan, was there.  He was tinkering with one of their other rovers and looked over at her excitedly as she pulled up.

 

“Nina! What’cha… Err… Where’s your door?” he asked, frowning at Nina’s dust-coated clothes and the melted, empty door frame on her passenger side.  He took two steps forward, getting uncomfortably close to her, his concern for her eclipsing his sense of boundaries.

 

“In the back.  Widow jus’ ‘bout caught me.  Yer gonna hafta rip out half of the frame to re-seat it.” Nina tried not to scowl at the impressionable boy and took a half step backwards to reclaim her personal space from him.

 

“A Widow? You’re joking.  Are you…” He took another half-step forward as though to offer her a conciliatory hug and Nina responded by turning away and walking towards the back where her salvaged missiles and passenger side door were both strapped.  

 

“Got a dozen undetted missiles here, leave those for Nugan.” She laid a hand on the missile rack and gave Ryan a purposeful look over her shoulder that made him pale a little bit.  “If you det ‘em accidentally the damage’ll be on my butt. And you’ll probably be scrapped.” She left him standing there awkwardly and went off to another part of the garage to where her bike was stored.

 

Less than a few minutes later, she was crouched low over her bike, roaring down the slope of the “mountain” towards the city of Abrandia, away from the recriminations of her peers and away from the consequences of her actions.

 

***

 

_ 1-13:25 NinaS: _ ‘ _ Where r u?’ _

 

_ 1-13:27 Butterfly: _ _ ‘1Sec.’ _

 

_ 1-13:28 NinaS: _ _ ‘U better’ _

 

_ 1-13:42 Butterfly: _ _ ‘Sry had a meeting.  I’m heading to SolSanna’s.’ _

 

_ 1-13:42 NinaS: _ _ ‘Omw 2 abrandia need to see u’ _

 

_ 1-13:46 Butterfly: _ _ ‘Sure.  You alright?’ _

 

_ 1-13:47 NinaS: _ _ ‘Almost got scavved by a widow life is shit’ _

 

_ 1-13:50 Butterfly: _ _ ‘Oh wow, that’s so messed up, I’m really sorry.’ _

 

_ 1-13:51 NinaS: _ _ ‘Its fine i just wanna see u’ _

 

_ 1-13:52 Butterfly: _ _ ‘Sure.  SolSanna’s?’ _

 

_ 1-13:52 NinaS: _ _ ‘C u soon butterfly.’ _

 

_ 1-13:53 Butterfly: _ _ ‘<3’ _

 

_ *** _

 

Another sensor sweep went out, as it did every forty seconds, and once again Dawn’s eyes flickered to their instruments for just a brief moment.  The readout again displayed a 1.74 x 10 -23 % chance that the sweep would have detected the presence of Dawn’s Mech through the stealth field.  Three airborne drones buzzed almost directly overhead. Dawn’s instruments calculated and displayed possible firing solutions for the Mech’s surface-to-air missiles.  None leapt out of the shoulder-mounted missile rack, and the drones flew past unmolested.

 

Dawn ignited their Ascension. It was a power that typically slept within Dawn’s chest, a power that would do little but harm them on its own, but it was the lifeblood of Dawn’s Mech, it was a key that unlocked the full strength of the technology that the precursor race had left behind.  The machine lurched out of standby, and started moving towards the watch post under Dawn’s command. Another sensor sweep came, and then a second, and a third. The stealth field showed a higher and higher, yet still pitifully small percent chance of detection, until Dawn was standing on the edge of the encampment.  There would almost certainly be a short range X-Ray scanner in the center of the station, something that  _ would _ pierce through Dawn’s stealth field if they brought the machine any closer.  Fortunately, Dawn had absolutely no need to stay hidden to get the job done.

 

The stealth field dropped, and Dusk’s weapons came to life.  Two nearby robots and a gun emplacement noticed the Mech immediately, and started to swerve their weapons to face it.  Most standard ExSol technology would barely even register on their radar, the same way a bow and arrow wouldn’t be worthy of notice.

 

Dawn aimed and fired the heavy plasma caster on Dusk’s right arm, slagging a hole clear through the the center of one of the robots and continuing onward to melt off the weapon emplacement of the other.  The Mech’s powerful gravity manipulation and its legs launched it forward towards the gun emplacement. The vibroblade attached to Dusk’s left arm passed through the gun emplacement like it was passing through air.  None of the three were able to fire a single shot as Dawn disposed of them; Dusk was not a bow and arrow.

 

The flying drones began to swerve back around, and Dawn’s instruments presented them with a firing solution for the missiles, which they approved.  There was a slight  _ thunk _ as three missiles shot out of Dusk’s shoulder and into the air.  Dawn leapt several dozen meters into the air with a strong shove from the gravity manipulators, and spun around to face the aerial attack craft which were the watch post’s main defenses.  Dawn flared on the stealth field for just a moment to scramble the aircraft’s missile locks and then opened up with the autocannons mounted on Dusk’s torso. The aircraft tried to evade the missiles Dusk had fired.  One got clipped and started to spin out, another evaded right into a hail of autocannon fire and was torn apart, and the third swerved high. The aircraft’s countermeasures no doubt worked frantically, and were rewarded with a premature detonation, allowing the craft to avoid the worst of the payload.

 

Dawn pulled the Mech back down towards the ground with the gravity manipulator, Dusk’s power reserves blaring a warning at them for overusing the energy-intensive feature of the Mech.  Dawn paid the alarms no heed, they knew Dusk’s limitations better than a pilot for whom those alarms had been designed. The missile control system came up with a new target lock for the remaining aircraft, and this time Dawn fired two missiles at the one craft, and then ignored it, leaving the drone to its fate.

 

There would be another five robots on the way, they patrolled the perimeter, but Dawn knew how much time they had until it arrived.  Dawn calmly walked their Mech around the mechanisms that composed the watch post, autocannons shredding another fixed gun emplacement as it popped out.  They located the X-Ray scanner that was painting a target on Dusk and very deliberately melted it into a pile of molten scrap with a single shot of their plasma caster.  Dawn just as calmly re-enabled their stealth field and headed off in the direction of the patrol, whose approach was now audible and coming across the speakers in the cockpit.  The four robots barely even reacted as Dawn sliced them apart with their vibroblade and then deactivated the stealth field.

 

Ten minutes later, Dawn had downloaded the information they had come for, and left the watch post as intact as they could.  A response team would undoubtedly show up soon and Dusk only carried so much ammunition. Besides, the attention of the precursor’s machines wasn’t the only thing Dawn needed to evade.

 

***

 

Abrandia was the second largest city on the planet, and largest on the continent.  It was built on one of the numerous stretches of flatlands that were typical of their planet, Ishtar.  After the alien machines had awakened and started furiously trying to kill one another, catching humanity in the crossfire, Abrandia had been the only human settlement not torn apart by resource-gatherers like the Widows.  It had been a tiny little settlement at the time, some religious group had set it aside for themselves to live apart from the rest of ExSol society. As it had turned out, the site of Abrandia’s founding was far enough away from any major mineral or resource deposits to avoid the attention of the precursor’s robots, and so refugees from all over the continent had settled there.

 

Nina sped along the road to Abrandia, and the city limits, and then one of the city’s guardians came into view.  Nina recognized the Mech, Titan, even from a distance. The ten meter tall humanoid Mech stood just beside Abrandia’s main gate.  It was mostly still, but obviously powered and active. Bristling with racks of missiles, autocannons, and even sporting a disintegration beam, Titan was most certainly the most powerful weapon on the planet.  Titan had been built from scratch using precursor technology, hence the sleek, streamlined humanoid form. Twinshya, by comparison, was a fully built precursor machine that they had shoehorned a human-sized cockpit into so that Carrina could pilot it.

 

Titan totally ignored her as she drove her bike up to the gate and stopped it right next to the agent’s booth.

 

“Miss Sahara, nice to see you, as always,” The guard droned with fake interest. He held out his hand and she handed him her Identification badge so that he could scan it for her before letting her into the city.  She didn’t bother responding to him, he apparently knew her name and she didn’t know his. It was an awkward conversation waiting to happen, so she avoided it.

 

She made her way through the winding streets of Abrandia’s slums.  Most of the city was kind of a built-up slum, a legacy of the city’s origin as a refugee camp.  It meant that navigating the city streets on a vehicle was slow going, but fortunately she wasn’t going far.   _ Hangman’s Crossing _ was a relatively large community center in the eastern residential sector and she circled her bike around the parking lot until she found a spot to park it.  The crossing consisted of a large open plaza with various structures and open amenities fanning out from it radially. A park dominated most of the eastern section of the ring, while subsidized restaurants and various other amenities occupied the northern and western section.  A huge, seven storey library towered over the plaza from the south, casting a shadow over part of the square. In the center, a large fountain sculpted in the likeness of the Archangel Agrianna stood proudly, her wings and arms spread, water pouring down from her eyes in rivulets to splash into the pond below her.

 

Nina cast a brief scowl at the Archangel as she always did, and headed towards SolSanna’s, a little cafe almost invisibly nestled between a large dance hall and a grocery distributor.  Her little butterfly, Robin, was sitting in a booth, the screen of his portable terminal shining a deep green light onto his face. She sat down next to him, draping her arm over his slender shoulders and crushing him close to her in an embrace.

 

Robin squeaked a little bit in surprise and recoiled skittishly in the way that he did before he realized it was her.  “Miss Nina!” he cooed happily, letting her crush him in her hug a little bit before he giggled and squirmed at the extreme pressure.  She relented, and leaned down to kiss him while still keeping his body close to hers.

 

“Hey, Butterfly,” she murmured softly. She felt the pent-up anxiety start to bleed out of her uncomfortably in ways that made her tremble just a little bit.  She realized that she hadn’t felt fine at all after the Widow had attacked her, just numbed. She’d had a few somewhat close scrapes, but nothing like that, and now she was thawing out and truly feeling the terror of the situation.

 

“You don’t sound fine, Nina,” Robin plucked the thought out of her head, looking up at her with those innocent eyes that she thought couldn’t possibly be cuter.

 

“Yeah… I don’t.” She agreed, still feeling tremors running through her body.  Her breathing accelerated a little, against her will, and she gave her head a shake that didn’t seem to fix anything at all.

 

“Tell me what happened,” Robin asked gently, taking her hand in his and giving it an encouraging squeeze.  Nina sighed slightly, she’d been planning on just using Robin to blow off some steam but instead the little bugger coaxed every little detail out of her.  She relayed the day’s events to him, pausing a few times to squeeze her eyes shut and steady her breathing.

 

“I’m gonna be in the hole over this.  Might’a broke the bots’ pattern. Sam flips his crib whenever I take risks, even ones that don’t... Ugh.” 

 

“Can something like a single Widow break such a solid pattern? That precursor installation has been locked for… how long? Isn’t it over a year now?”

 

“Who knows.  The ‘cursor’s automated bots are real loopy.  Sam sure thinks patterns are fragile. Fragile enough that I get my tail chewed off for any nudge.” One of the serving staff apparently recognized Nina and took it upon herself to bring her a coffee.  She set the drink down on the table and gave the two of them a warm smile. Nina tried not to give her the stink eye, it was weird of her to intrude but she was trying to be nice, at least.

 

“Soooo~ Guess what I just dug up today?”  Robin grinned at her conspiratorially. The look on his face suggested that he’d been struggling to keep his lips sealed about some bit of information he’d dredged up.

 

“What secrets did my stealthy little butterfly uncover?” She chuckled at him fondly and dragged him into her lap, ignoring the coffee steaming away on the table.

 

“You asked me if I could find any strange new Mechs popping up into Abrandia’s registry, remember?”

 

“Ye.  You told me you’d also track down some livin’ precursors.” Nina frowned at him, remembering the smart-ass response he’d given her and not gotten disciplined for.  The nervous laugh that came out of Robin just confirmed that he’d just remembered that detail as well.

 

“Weeeelllll.  I found something.”  He grinned at her victoriously, as though that would get him off the hook.  It wouldn’t.

 

“Spill.” She squeezed him threateningly and Robin squeaked a little.  She quite enjoyed that noise.

 

“A Mech showed up in the registry two days ago.  The pilot was registered as Dawn, and the Mech was registered as Dusk.  I thought it was a prank or something, since you can’t just register a fake name.”  Robin prattled out his answer energetically, clearly more motivated by the idea that he’d found something Nina had asked for rather than frightened by her implied threat.

 

“Two days? Could it’a been here longer?” she probed, hugging Robin close to her and abandoning the playful threats.  This was quite possibly the machine she’d seen using gravity manipulation out in the forest a few times this week. Only an Ascension machine, one piloted by a human, could use that kind of technology.

 

“Maybe.  I could try to dig up why they needed to dock the machine, what work needed to be done.  Might be able to extrapolate what its been up to prior.” He gave her a curious look, as though he’d thought this was just a joke that Nina hadn’t expected an answer to.

 

“Do it.  What else?” Nina looked down at him with a wicked grin and gave him a playful grope to try and cut the seriousness.  Robin was far too pretty to have a worried look on his face.

 

Robin squeaked a little and his tone quickly changed.  “A-Anyway. Turns out this pilot, Dawn, is real. The name might be fake but they’re an off-worlder so the Abrandian government couldn’t verify it and just took their word for it.  Sounds like they’re all the way from Neo-Venus.”

 

“From NV? What’re they doing out here in the butt of nowhere, then?”

 

“Haven’t figured that one out yet.  They’re not taking contracts or anything.  They sure could if they wanted to, with a Mech that advanced.”

 

“Hrmph.  What’s the Ascension on it? Maybe I can swindle Sunrise outta it.” Nina prodded Robin for a bit more information but kept it playful.  She didn’t want Robin getting too stressed out over this.

 

“Sorry, Miss Nina, sounds like  _ Dawn _ has Zenith, not Pulse.” Robin sounded sincere in his respectful tone but Nina knew the brattiness was lurking just below the surface.  It seemed possible that he was being a slight bit snarky about her saying Dawn’s name wrong, after all. She decided not to punish him for it, all things considered he was showing a lot of obedience.

 

“Figures.  Only Pulse Mech on the planet  _ would _ be Twinshya.” Nina nudged at the little muscle, the little reflex inside her chest.  She had the ability to trigger her Ascension, Pulse, at any time. Doing so would flood her with a euphoric high, send her into a state of hyper-awareness and enhanced reflexes for about three minutes.  Unfortunately, immediately after those three minutes had expired, she would Counter-Pulse for another three minutes, causing her diaphragm and ribcage to lock up. Her breathing would stop for that time and she’d pass out unless she was on a ventilator.  A Pulse Mech was fuelled by the activation of Pulse by a human, or presumably by one of the precursor race, back when they had yet lived. To that end, the cockpit of a Pulse Mech like Twinshya was equipped with a ventilator so that the pilot could stay conscious.

 

Nina pushed away the temptation to trigger her Pulse as she usually did.  Now wasn’t the time. It was never the time. “Whatev. Zenith Mechs are all trash.  No firepower, no point.”

 

“I hear this machine is pretty much the gleam of the gates.  Seems like it might be as advanced as Titan. Haven’t gotten a chance to catch it in the flesh it yet but I’m trying.”  Robin grinned at her suggestively and Nina did her best not to roll her eyes at his awful double entendre. She was surprised to find her mood lifting a bit, she’d initially been pretending for Robin’s sake but then he’d gone and made it genuine.

 

Nina’s hand terminal buzzed in the padded seat next to her leg, and she glanced down at it.  She thought she saw a notification for a new message on the screen at the strange angle, but it was gone instantly as the terminal switched over to a low-battery logo and started powering itself down.  Probably wasn’t important, if it was anything at all.

 

“Where’s yer brother?” Nina asked suddenly.

 

“Still out of town on a job.  I’ve got our place to myself,” Robin answered eagerly, excitement flashing in his eyes.

 

Nina grinned at him, and the look in his eyes confirmed the implied invitation.  “Let’s go, Butterfly,”

 

***

 

Robin opened the door to the apartment he shared with his brother, and Nina pushed her way inside immediately, leaving him behind while she went to his refrigerator to help herself to some alcohol.  She only vaguely heard Robin moving about behind her as she snagged one of the many plastic bladders with a teal label on it, indicating that it contained something alcoholic yet drinkable. She sucked on the mouthpiece and squeezed herself a heavy drink of the burning liquid.  She repeated the process three more times and drained half of the bladder, feeling a sort of dull buzz already setting in. She re-sealed the container and tossed it back into the fridge, shutting the door with a loud rattle.

 

Her thoughts turned towards Robin, and she turned around slowly even as she felt her cock starting to twitch and come to life.  She hadn’t come to Abrandia to cry and sob and emotionally lean on Robin for support. She’d come here to fuck the daylights out of the little twink and dump a load of cum into his ass.

 

“Butterfly,” she called.  Nina took a few steps in the direction of the bedroom, pulling off her belt and letting the leather and metal implement fall to the floor with a very distinctive-sounding clank.

 

“Over here, Miss Nina~” Robin called from his bedroom in a seductive voice.  Nina hummed expectantly and stalked her way there. Robin’s room was messy, with a few piles of clothes pushed off to the side, probably done just a few moments ago to make it appear less of a disaster.  She didn’t care, compared to her quarters, Robin’s was a picture of order.

 

Robin himself was lying on his bed, his package cupped by a little pink thong.  He was wearing a silly, completely ineffectual little bra which was mostly just a few pieces of heart-shaped material stretched across his nipples connected by a flimsy string.  She had no idea if he’d been wearing that under his clothes all day, or if he’d put it on for her sake. Right now, she didn’t care.

 

“Beg,” she demanded, stepping out of her pants and kicking them off to the side.  Her underwear, more masculine than Robin’s, ironically, came free a moment later and was summarily tossed into another corner of the room.  Robin crawled off the floor-height mattress that was his bed and came towards Nina on all four, his eyes locked with hers, his little pink tongue slowly darting across his glossy lips.

 

“Oh please, Miss Nina, let your nasty little boy whore suck on your cock?” Robin cooed, sticking his tongue out and opening his mouth wide.

 

Nina took her cock in hand and  gave it a slow deliberate stroke to encourage it and bring it to life.  She squeezed the soft, hot flesh and the tingle of pleasure it sent through her made her hungry to abuse the begging boy before her, but she restrained herself.  She tightened her fingers around the base of her cock and squeezed upward, forcing a droplet of precum out of her urethra. She flicked the clear fluid at Robin, making him flinch slightly as the pre sprayed across his tongue and face.  Her boy waited patiently as she took a slow step towards him, erect cock casting a shadow over his eager mouth as his eyes watched it wantingly. Nina slowly threaded her fingers through Robin’s long, fine hair, getting a strong grip on his skull with both hands.  She slowly ground her cock against his face, teasing him, making him whimper. His hot breath tickled the underside of her shaft and she exhaled slowly, enjoying the anticipation of the moment. She knew that taking her time like this was torture for the poor boy but she enjoyed it.  The power and the anticipation were immensely satisfying.

 

“Miss Niinnnaaaa!” Robin’s patience finally crumbled and he whined at her. He squirmed around with his hands rubbing his thighs, looking up at with an expression halfway between betrayed puppy and wanton slut.

 

“Y’think pesterin’ gon’ get that fuckhole of yers filled sooner?” Nina laughed cruelly, giving Robin’s skull one last squeeze before she removed one of her hands and gripped the base of her cock.  She firmly slapped Robin’s face with her meat once, twice, three times. She grinned wider as Robin flinched at the impacts, practically drooling over her cock in anticipation. A sadistic impulse passed through her and she slapped him with her cock again,  _ hard. _  Her own cock stung a bit at the impact as it loudly cracked against’s Robin’s poor face.  The poor, abused twink whined again, turning his head slightly to the side. Nina released her cock and petted Robin’s precum-splattered hair soothingly for just a moment to put him at ease.  She almost immediately went and stuck her thumbs past his shiny glossed lips and into his mouth, mildly fish-hooking his mouth open into an deformed and obscene expression. She poised her cock at the entrance of his stretched-out mouth, probing his taut, shiny lips with the tip and spreading a little precum across them.

 

Robin made a weird, garbled noise that was a combination of impatience and cock-lust.  Nina just smirked down at him and his inability to slobber all over her cock like he wanted to.  “Yer a lucky li’l cumdump, y’kno?”Nina snickered at him derisively and nudged her hips forward, slowly invading Robin’s wet, eager mouth.  He moaned loudly as her tip brushed against his tongue and smeared a bit of precum across it. She removed her thumbs, wiping his saliva off on his cheeks and smearing a bit of his makeup.  Robin wasted absolutely no time, creating a perfect wet tunnel of suction around her girl cock. Nina sighed softly, her shoulders slumping and her whole body relaxing a bit as Robin blew her while making the happiest squealing noises she’d ever heard come out of another human being.  Robin swirled his tongue around all the right spots, applied a firm constant suction, and didn’t scrape her with his teeth even once. Nina wasn’t normally much for blowjobs, give her some boy, girl, or enby’s nice tight pussy or asshole to fuck and she was a happy woman. She made an exception with Robin, the boy was never happier than he was with a cock in his mouth and he was also just really good at it.

 

“Mm! Mm!” Robin whined softly, his delicate hands circling around Nina’s solid hips so that he could pull himself forward and slide Nina’s cock deep into his tight throat.  Nina hummed appreciatively, the squeeze of Robin’s trachea so tight that she could feel the individual rings of cartilage against her fat swollen head. She placed her own strong hand at the base of his skull to trap him in place and looked down at him with a wicked grin as she gyrated her hips.  Her balls were pressed firmly up against Robin’s chest and his nose was buried deep in her pubic hair and against her mound. After a few moments in that position with his airway completely blocked by Nina’s womanhood, his own eyes flickered upwards toward her and he made a tiny attempt to pull back which was prevented by Nina’s strong grip on his head.

 

She raised an eyebrow at him with a cruel smirk, delighting in the instinctive look of panic that crept into his face as his brain was deprived of oxygen for longer than it should have been.  Robin’s fingernails dug ineffectually into Nina’s ass and he squirmed, trying to get free.

 

“S’matter, Butterfly?” Nina laughed, giving a few lazy thrusts of her hips into the pinned boy’s mouth.  She revelled in the pleasure and contrasts of what she was doing. The soft wet hole squeezing her dick perfectly, the beautiful, delicate feminine boy before her was contrasted against the obscenity of the act he was performing, and his rising panic only fuelled her sadistic joy in watching him struggle.  Finally, she relented, letting him go so that he could pull himself off of her and he fell back onto his ass, coughing and gasping, lines of drool dripping off Nina’s cock and Robin’s chin.

 

“M-Mean…” Robin whined, wheezing and doing his best to pout at her.

 

Nina didn’t respond.  She grabbed Robin by his hair again and walked over to the bed.  He squealed in surprise again, stumbling and scrambling to keep up with her.  She put her other hand on his back and shoved him onto the bed belly down with his knees still on the floor.  She knew from experience that Robin’s bed was the right height for this. She stole one of Robin’s half a dozen pillows  from the head of his bed and threw it onto the ground to kneel upon. She paused for a moment to look and make sure she’d grabbed one of the right ones.  Robin was honestly such a princess about some of his things, some of the pillows were for cuddling and she wasn’t supposed to kneel on them. He was never forceful about stuff like that but Nina knew it meant a lot to him.

 

Robin was wearing a sizable glass buttplug, the huge toy splitting his fat ass open with his tiny g-string running down the middle of it.  She wondered with amusement how long he’d had this in, whether he’d somehow stuffed his greedy hole with it when she was stealing his brother’s alcohol or if he’d had it in all day.  She grabbed the heavy toy and pulled, eliciting a groan from Robin as it stretched his asshole even further to accomodate for the thick part of the toy. It came out with a pop and a feminine squeal, a miniature deluge of fresh lube rubbing down his asscrack with it, solving the mystery of when he’d inserted the toy.

 

She placed the glass object off to the side on his nightstand, and eyed Robin’s loosely gaping pucker hungrily.  She loved to do this, it was no doubt why he’d prepped himself this way, the little whore. She grabbed Robin’s hips, positioned her cock, and slammed her cock into his already well-stretched hole.  He squealed and groaned, the force of Nina’s thrusts skidding him forward across his bed a little as she fucked him roughly, with no reservations or restrictions. Even with as stretched as his cunt was, Nina had a big dick and Robin tightened up quickly, and Nina was quickly humming with pleasure as she slaked her frustrations, love, and lust on the twink’s supple body.

 

Nina grunted loudly, the grinding friction of Robin’s slick insides was riling her up, making waves of pleasure wash over her, pushing her to a crescendo.  Normally she’d have waited, slowed herself down, made Robin beg to cum himself before she jerked him off and then finally unloaded in him. Right now, she had no patience, she’d almost died today and she just wanted to fill Robin’s ass with her semen as fast as she could.  He’d be pouty about it, but that was fine.

 

“Heccck!” Nina snarled, slamming her hips so hard into Robin’s pillowy cheeks that she bed creaked and shifted across the floor a bit.  Completely buried in his ass, she fucked him through her orgasm in shallow thrusts as her cock overflowed with heat and pleasure and started to dump her cum into him.  Robin whined and groaned a little, shivering and gyrating his hips against her. She finally slowed down, her cock twitching and dribbling the last of its load out into her boyfriend’s pussy.  She leaned forward, putting her weight on top of him a little and panting as an orgasmic afterglow settled over her. She could feel Robin vibrating with need and lust under her and she smirked a little bit at his blueballed distress.  She slowly extracted her cock from his abused hole and grabbed the glass buttplug again, slowly working it back into place. Robin whined and shivered as she stretched him wide again and settled the plug into place, the clear glass allowing Nina to see inside his pink rectum and even to see a bit of the cum she’d dumped in there.  Robin was pouting a little but she knew he loved it. With a sigh, Nina finished removing her pants and kicked them off to the side, laying down on the bed in just her bra and panties.

 

“Sorry t’rabbit ya t’night, babe,” Nina murmured as she felt her body relax and start to drift off.

 

“Love you, Miss Nina,” Robin giggled after a brief pause, leaning in to kiss her on the forehead as she drifted off to sleep.  

 

***

 

Nina awoke from her post-coital comatose state with a soft grunt.  Robin was next to her, sleeping peacefully in his nightgown with his hair tied up so that it wouldn’t get tangled as he slept.  She watched him quietly as she slowly awakened, not wanting to disturb him since she had no idea what kind of sleep schedule he was on; he could have only recently gone to bed for all she knew.  She rolled over a little and looked at the nightstand. Her hand terminal was there, power off but battery recharged, Robin must have plugged it in for her. She sat on the bed next to Robin’s sleeping form and flicked the terminal on, a sense of dread slowly coiling in her stomach.  It went through the sequence of powering up, connecting to the wireless network, and then fetching her messages. Ten unread messages, three from Carrina, two from Ryan, one from Nugan, and four from her boss, Sam.

 

 _1-14:41 NotActuallyMyMom:_ _Nina, You, Sam, and I need to have a talk, can you come by his office in ten minutes?_

 

_ 1-14:50 NotActuallyMyMom: _ _ You’re not here.  I know you got my last message.  This is serious Nina, you almost died today, please, we need to talk about this. _

 

_ 1-15:32 Samooel(Cowface): _ _ Nina you cannot turn your GPS off.  Literally, by contract, you cannot turn it off.  Turn it on, answer our calls. Now. _

 

_ 1-15:40 Samooel(Cowface): _ _ This is not a hecking joke, where are you? _

 

_ 1-16:10 Nucant: _ _ TWELVE missiles!?!?! Nina youre awesome. _

 

_ 1-16:45 Samooel(Cowface): Where the heck are you? _

 

_ 1-17:10 NotActuallyMyMom: _ _ We’ll have to talk tomorrow, Nina.  You can’t just disappear on us like this. _

 

_ 1-17:42 Ryakie: _ _ Hey Boss……. So, Sam came into the workshop which he never does and he asked where you were and I dunno I panicked I told him you were here but left after we got our work done so he thinks you’re on break and gonna be right back so basically I’m really sorry I think I made it worse but I just wanted you to know please dont be mad at me _

 

_ 1-17:42 Ryakie: _ _ See you tonight? :x _

 

_ 2-00:25 Samooel(Cowface): _ _ Where the heck are you? _

  
  


She sighed, terminal flopping into her lap as she relaxed the hand that was holding it in a position to be read.  This was bad. In a way, Sam couldn’t really fire her, he needed her _.   _ That being said, he had a temper and it sounded like he was raging pretty hard at her right now.  She couldn’t get a mechanic job in Abrandia, not with her criminal record. She’d either have to live on basic assistance or move, blow all her savings on going cross-continent or maybe even off-world.  She’d have to leave Robin behind, and her dream of piloting a Mech of her own one day would slip ever further away. She may even have to cut into her surgery fund… as pitiful as that little pile of savings was.

 

She looked over at Robin, watching his chest rise and fall steadily.  Part of her wanted to reach out to him, to vocalize all her worries, to hear his gentle reassurances, but she stopped herself.  Silently, she got dressed and left, heading back towards their camp to deal with her problems herself. Even if everybody was asleep by the time she got back, it somehow felt like this disaster would be better if she was there when they woke up.


	2. Chapter 2

The knock at the door was soft and unimposing, it was a knock meant to check to see if Nina was awake, rather than one to awaken her. Nina was sleeping, technically, but she was expecting this knock, and sleeping lightly enough in that moment that her eyes opened and she sat up.

“Who’s?” She asked drearily, rubbing her eyes.

“Carrina,” she called softly through the door. She entered after Nina grunted her approval. The ghost of a scowl temporarily replaced her look of concern when she saw Nina was topless but it faded almost too quickly for Nina to notice. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” Nina grumbled, still a bit sleepy. She let her breasts remain uncovered for a few moments, almost as a challenge, but finally relented and picked up the blanket and pulled it up to cover herself.

“Why’d you ignore our messages? You know your contract.” Nina being covered, Carrina clearly felt empowered enough to come forward and sit on the edge of the bed.

“Went to go see Robin. Terminal went kaput. Battery. Wasn’t thinkin’ that Sam’d shred his mirror over nothin’. Why’d you even tell him?”

“Nina, I fired the Gauss cannon to save you. You know Sam always wants a report when I do that, those slugs aren’t cheap.” Carrina sighed a little bit and managed to not roll her eyes condescendingly at Nina this time.

“Keep tellin’ Sam that stupid cannon is bleedin’ metal ‘cuz we use pure tungsten.” Nina muttered.

“Nina that’s not– Listen, if you’d just given a report with me, this wouldn’t have been an issue and you could be spending all day with your boyfriend after we book you some trauma counseling. Now Sam’s all lathered up about pattern breaking.”

“Pattern already wobblin’ I checked my logs, the scavvers n Widows came five minutes ’fore they shoulda. Real breaker is that Mech I told you ‘bout.” Nina stood up a little straighter. This was what she had been preparing for. Getting the truth out before they pinned the blame on her for when the behavioral pattern of the precursor’s machines finally did break and become unstable and unpredictable again.

“The… Mech? What Mech?” Carrina asked, suddenly confused.

“The stealth-tech one that I spotted in the woods last week. Robin found a new Mech on the books in Abrandia, somethin’ from Neo-Venus. Robin says it’s Zenith. Most stealth Mechs’re Zenith.”

“Some… Mech from Neo-Venus illegally poaching our tech. An invisible Mech, that you couldn’t get clear footage of.”

“It’s. Stealth.” Nina scowled, overwhelmed by the stupidity of Carrina’s complaint. More proof, and Carrina still played the needlessly stubborn skeptic. “An’ I don’ drive t’wards plasma casters firin’ off in the canopy to get a better rez on a video for detective Sam. I almost get slagged enough as-is, thanks.”

Carrina heaved a heavy sigh, leaning back a little and giving Nina a sad look, like she was about to tell her that her kitten had died. Nina almost wanted to glance at the foot of the bed to make sure that her kitten, Jeffie, was still there. “I want to believe you, Nina, but I’m having a hard time. You know Sam won’t buy this.”

“Well, s’why it helps t’have someone with four lobes backin’ me an’ not three.” Nina cast her blanket away and got out of bed. Carrina let out an exasperated and embarrased noise at Nina’s lack of modesty and looked away as she went over to get dressed.

“Fine. Show me your new proof and I’ll see what I can do. If we actually have a poacher from Neo-Venus with a gleaming Mech then I guess we’ll have a serious problem. A stealth Mech, no less.” Carrina remained seated on the bed but kept looking at the far wall. Jeffie was actually awake now, and the little kitten hopped up onto her lap, making the woman jump in surprise.

Nina snickered at Carrina awkwardly trying to dislodge the affectionate kitten from her lap as she wiggled her way into a bra that she still wasn’t used to yet. She grabbed her hand terminal once she had her underwear on and sent the relevant files to Carrina.

“...Dawn and Dusk? Nina you can’t be serious.” Carrina shooed Jeffie off her lap and the kitten padded over to Nina. He squeaked and put his paws up on Nina’s leg, begging for attention.

“Abrandia registry doesn’t joke. You know that.” Nina grabbed her crumpled pants off the floor where she’d left them and pulled them on, at which point Carrina finally stopped staring at the far wall and looked over at her.

“No, I guess you’re right on that one. What makes you think this Mech is gleaming enough to have functional stealth tech?” Nina was a little surprised that Carrina was pretending to believe her, but she probably felt guilty over ratting her out to Sam.

“Lookit the autocannon ammo. 25-series rounds. No garbage pile like Twinshya is loading those.”

Carrina frowned and flipped through the files. “Are you even supposed to have this ammunition manifest?”

“Prob not. Butterfly doesn’t explain, I don’t ask.”

“That boy…” Carrina muttered to herself, probably holding herself back from embarking on one of her rants about how he was a bad influence on Nina. “Well, I’ll look through all this. Do me a favor and double check Twinshya’s deflectors? I got a little more rattle from that Widow than I should have.”

“I gotta replace half the conduit in that bucket and I’ve negative bits of conduit t’do it with.” Nina grumbled, picking up Jeffie and giving him some attention so that he’d stop clawing at her ankle.

“Do what you can with what you have,” Carrina sighed. She left Nina without even so much as a look, instead staring at the files Nina had given her. Maybe she was taking it seriously, she wasn’t that good of an actor, after all.

A little while later, Sam found her in the workshop, disassembling one of the missiles she’d salvaged that Nugan hadn’t quite gotten to yet. He stood there for a second, a scowl on his face and angry comment waiting on his lips to be unleashed.

“Your terminal ran out of power? Do you really expect me to believe that?” he asked.

“Don’t expect. Don’t care.” she muttered, carefully removing the fuel housing of the missile she was working on and setting it to the side.

Sam frowned at her for a moment, before he sighed and straightened up a little. “Nina I’m putting your contract on probation. We’ll re-evaluate your position with us in three weeks. Until then I’m empowered to terminate your contract for breaches similar to the one you pulled last night.”

“Fine.” Nina rolled her eyes. Sam couldn’t really fire her, he barely had the crew necessary to keep Twinshya running as it was, and he was too cheap to pay anybody a real wage, it was why he’d jumped at the chance to hire a delinquent like Nina with a shady off-the-books contract in the first place. The fact that Nina was a good mechanic was just his dumb luck.

Sam stayed there for a few moments, expecting her to say something, but she didn’t, and he eventually just walked away and left her alone as she tore apart the missiles she’d nearly died to acquire.

**

Miya yawned sleepily as consciousness slowly came back to her. She stretched, wiggling her toes and cracking her fingers. Her leg brushed up against something warm in her bed, something unexpectedly lying right next to her. She jumped in fright, yelping softly and recoiling. A man was sleeping there next to her, breathing softly, his short dark hair flopped over his forehead. She recognized him, and memories of last night slowly came back to her.

“Ugh,” she muttered softly, scowling at the intruding man and giving him a gentle kick. “Hey. Wake up.” The man stirred and Miya struggled to remember his name. Her companion, Naz, just giggled at her dilemma and offered no help. He was her dalliance and not Naz’, after all.

“Whuh?” he groaned sleepily, turning over a little but not sitting up properly.

“Wake up. You said you’d be gone before morning,” she kicked him again a little more firmly and he groaned in response.

Slowly he sat up, rubbing his eyes and looking at her in a somewhat dopey way. His eyes flickered to her chest for a moment but she held the blanket up and scowled at him to keep his attention on her face. “I said what?”

“You promised you wouldn’t stay the night. Did you crawl into bed with me after I went to sleep?” Her withering glare made him recoil a bit and blush in embarrassment.

“I… don’t…”

“Whatever. Just— Just get dressed and get out,” Miya gathered up some blankets and used them to cover herself as she went into her bathroom. Whomever this shrew was, she wouldn’t be inviting him back to their house again, she hated people being there when she woke up and her regulars were men who knew that.

“Perhaps a narrower range of courtesans would fit your requirements better, sister?” Naz’s voice spoke teasingly in the mind that the two of them shared.

“Don’t want people getting clingy,” Miya responded, rolling her eyes as she washed her hair. “Better if I don’t see them too often. I have to keep a wide rotation.”

A few minutes later, Miya stepped out of the shower and saw that her guest was gone, and had left behind only some contact information on a piece of paper. She stalked over to the paper and snatched it up off the bed, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the recycler without reading it. When she went over to fish out her hand terminal from the drawer she’d locked it in, she saw it had a notification on it. It was a reminder that they had a meeting this morning, and she cursed when she realized that she only had a few minutes to get going.

The light of Ishtar’s star was dim and cast shadows across the city of Abrandia as it began to dip towards the horizon. The planet’s forty three hour revolutionary period meant that most people measured two twenty one and a half sleep cycles per ishtar “day”, so second morning came just as the star was starting to hang low in the sky. Miya walked to the tram station and waited at the back of the small group of people on the platform, avoiding contact. One of Abrandia’s four aging and banged up maglev trains came along and stopped at the platform with a soft hiss.

The trip was as uneventful as she could have hoped for, she stood at the doors to the train and stared at the city rushing past her as the train went several stops to her destination. Waking up next to her guest had set her into a bad mood for the day and it felt like she had something crawling under her skin.

With Miya stewing and fidgeting, Naz took control and looked around the train cart. She saw someone who reminded Naz of her girlfriend Marielle, she had similar dark and curly hair that hung down around her shoulders, though this woman was a fair bit older. She smiled warmly at the woman and waved. The woman returned the gesture though didn’t smile quite as much in return. Abrandia was a nice place, people were warmer and friendlier here than many other places, but strange people smiling at you on the train was perhaps still a bit off-putting for most.

The train stopped almost directly in front of the low-key militia building that was actually an administrative office but looked just like any other residence in the neighborhood. Naz headed into the foyer, flimsy door to the street slapping shut behind her with the guarded door into the compound lying just ahead.

“Morning, Naz,” The door guard whose name they couldn’t remember waved at her and then punched a code into the door to open it. The fact that he’d addressed the two of them as Naz wasn’t surprising, most of the people at her job knew Naz much better, which was mostly by Miya’s own design.

“Unseen blessing, friend,” Naz waved at him as she walked past. As she spoke the words she concentrated slightly upon the melody playing in her mind. Their Ascension, Tempest, was a constant presence. It wasn’t a distinct thinking, feeling individual like Naz and Miya were, but rather it was a vague melancholic sensation and a soft discordant song that rose and fell, seemingly at random. Many ExSol’s possessed of the strange, rare Ascension knew it wasn’t just random. There was a deeper force at work, an echoing whisper left behind by the Precursors for the ExSol’s to find and decipher.

“There will be time for your superstitious obsessions later, c’mon,” Miya snapped Naz out of her daze and took the two of them through the militia’s administrative building towards the conference room. The door had been left cracked open, and their uncle Wasseim, Knight-Captain of the Abrandia Militia, was already droning on about something or another inside.

“Forgive our sloth, Uncle,” Naz apologized with a calm smile as she walked into the room. Wasseim and the other pilots just gave her a very cursory glance before she slipped into her seat. One of the pilots in particular, Analu, gave her a dirty look as though she’d offended him. Naz returned the look with a warm smile, and Analu just shook his head as though she’d offended him further, and looked back at Wasseim.

“I’m gonna punch him right in the face one day,” Miya thought, and Naz just giggled.

The briefing didn’t go terribly long before Naz closed her eyes, drowning out her uncle’s boring recitation of the briefing and letting the melody of Tempest envelop her. Tempest was pretty today, the humming vibration in her chest had a slow, soothing tempo that she enjoyed. Some days Tempest felt angry and agitated, and that was distressing. Those days, she blocked the melody out as best she could, which wasn’t always very well.

“Oi! Naz! Quit dreamin!” Her uncle Wasseim’s voice cut through the reverie. She opened her eyes slowly and blinked at him, confused.

“...Uncle?” she asked.

“C’mon, kit, can’t’cha at least ‘tend to pay attention? Makes me look like a goof, y’know?”

“He doesn’t care if he looks like a goof. Just thinks he’s protecting us.” Miya’s thoughts interjected themselves into their mind, along with a feeling of incredulity and exasperation. Miya didn’t much care for their uncle, but Miya didn’t care for anybody.

“Will try, Uncle,” Naz smiled at him sincerely even as Miya grumbled silently. Wasseim’s shoulders slumped in defeat and he sighed.

“Heckin’ ridiculous,” Analu muttered just loud enough that a few people heard but not loudly enough to announce it to the room.

“Care to repeat that, Ana?” Miya asked with a scowl, her intensity overriding Naz’ calm presence in that moment.

“Yeah, it’s ridiculous that you can’t take this job seriously, we have Hallu terrorists in the city, Talon is on a security upswing, and mos—” Analu squealed as Wasseim walked up behind him, grabbed him by the wrist and twisted it behind his back in a display of martial training. They knew that their uncle hadn’t seen any active hand-to-hand combat in probably decades, but he made it look as easy as picking up a pebble

“Oi, Ana?” He said, his voice calm and dark. “Y’think ye can pilot Titan better’n Miya?”

“C-Course I can’t, I don’t have Tempest,” he yelped, reaching back and grabbing Wasseim by the arm to try to alleviate the pressure on his shoulder.

“Y’got a problem with yer CO’s disciplinary actions?” He asked.

Analu was quiet for a moment before he shook his head, his squirming taking on a greater intensity as Wasseim continued to pressure his shoulder.

“Then mebbe shut yer mouth ‘n leave Nazmiya ‘t me, ye?” Wasseim didn’t wait for a response and let Analu go, casting a challenging glance around the room which wasn’t met by a single pair of eyes except Miya’s. “An’ Miya. These new security ‘cols are more fer you than the rest’ve us. Hallucia finds out yer the only pilot for Titan, ‘s a big target on yer back. Show some respect.”

“Of course, Uncle. I will contemplate Tempest’s blessing later.” Naz smiled at him. Wasseim’s shoulders slumped again and he shook his head.

“Could barely handle one niece,” He muttered, going back to his briefing.

***

Dawn watched the van through the corner of their eye, making sure not to make it too obvious that they were aware of the amateurs’ presence. Dawn wasn’t fully aware of all the aspects of this operation. They didn’t need to know, so they hadn’t been told. Even if they had been fully briefed, it wasn’t Dawn’s place to question the necessity of their role, and so they didn’t. Still, that didn’t mean that Dawn was particularly fond of this phase of the operation. This was the part where they sat out here in plain sight while some mercenaries hired by a deranged zealot watched with guns readied.

Dawn lowered their spoon to their bowl of soup and brought some up to their lips, maintaining a picture of patience and boredom for the people who were probably watching them through binoculars. Unlike Neo-Venus, Abrandia did use a market-based exchange system for many things, but food and housing weren’t included in that system. Dawn’s room and meals in this hostel would be provided for them without question for as long as they wished, which meant that they didn’t have much to do but sit around and wait for their contact give them the go-ahead to start the next phase of the mission. That, and recover properly from the beating Emilia had given them last week.

Dawn’s terminal buzzed softly against the table, the vibrations making the piece of hardware rotate a few degrees. Dawn very casually put their spoon down and checked who was calling them, suppressing how eager they were to get out in Dusk and continue their actual work instead of sitting here like a worm wriggling on a hook.

32:30 Abrandia Docking Admin: Hello, Mx.Dawn? Do you have a moment to clarify something for me?

32:31 Dawn: Yes.

Dawn frowned a little at the message. Why would the docking administration be bothering them again? Getting past the wall of the bureaucracy here had been odious but Dawn had done everything thoroughly so as to make follow up clarifications unnecessary. There were no doubt discrepancies in the records, but Dawn had greased palms and waved distracting leads at people such that nothing would turn up foul until next quarter when they did a full audit.

32:31 Abrandia Docking Admin: The housing office didn’t link your profile with where you have the Mech stored. Just wanted to confirm you’re living in housing unit # 25340-T and your machine is docked at # 130-M?

32:33 Dawn: No. Housing unit #25339-T and dock #112-M

32:33 Abrandia Docking Admin: Oh really? Looks like we had a mix-up after all. Thanks for clarifying! Have a nice stay in Abrandia, Mx.

Dawn stared at the messages for a while, frowning and unable to shake the feeling that something was wrong. The message appeared to be legitimate. Dawn double-checked the source that the connection had come from, it was the same people who had given Dawn the permissions to house Dusk in the facility it was still occupying. Paranoia crept across Dawn’s uneasy mind but there was nothing to be done about it. Dawn’s instructions were to be completely co-operative with the local government and to sit still and await further instructions. And so, that’s just what they did.

**

32:50 Butterfly: Hey, Miss Nina, guess who I found?

33:12 NinaS: Just say it not in mood

33:15 Butterfly: Dawn’s in town. I found where they’re staying.

33:15 NinaS: On my way msg me details

33:17 Butterfly: Housing unit #25339-T and the Mech is in dock #112-M

33:20 NinaS: 112m? Heck ya ty Butterfly talk later

Dawn’s accommodations were a little hostel tucked away near the industrial district of Abrandia, no doubt chosen for proximity to wherever it was the pilot’s Mech was docked than anything else. As luck would have it, she found them in the little common area porch, easily identifying them at a glance.

The Ascension that ExSol’s called Zenith steadily increased up the internal body temperature of the person who was activating it. Unlike Pulse, it could be freely activated and deactivated, but provided no thrilling rush, no heady moments of hyper-awareness. The cockpit of a Zenith Mech, by necessity, had refrigeration and heat sinking capabilities to stop the pilot from getting heatstroke. Some small percentage of people who both had and actively used Zenith had their hair burned off, typically people with fine, blonde hair that was susceptible to the increased temperature. Dawn was one of those people, bald and pale without even a single eyelash or eyebrow.

Nina approached Dawn’s table with the plate of food she’d acquired from a nearby restaurant. She dropped her plate onto the table and it landed with a rattle of recyclable cutlery. She watched the androgynous pilot for a few moments, hoping to get some bluster out of them but instead they simply looked up at her curiously and with a sense of impenetrable calm.

“This one would be pleased to be of assistance with or without the theatrics, miss.” Their voice was soft and had a smooth flow to it that seemed practiced to the point of being unnatural. Like the pilot themselves, it had a genderlessness to it that had to be intentional.

“This one? You talking ‘bout you? Mebbe ya got some robot who’s watching and yer… narratin’ on your… uhh…” She trailed off as the logic of her own snarky comment got away from her. The pilot remained as unperturbed at her failed attempt at a joke as they had at her intrusion.

“Dawn is this one’s name, and they are the only one you are speaking to, though the reason for your accostation remains a point of interest.” Dawn offered a clarification, acting like the way they were speaking and Nina’s comment were both perfectly normal. Nina scowled at their demeanour, wondering if they were outright batty or just trying to mock her. Well, if it was a ribbing she was getting, then she’d figured that she deserved it for ruining her joke.

“I saw you. That machine of yers, out by that big ‘ol Talon fortress. You were pokin’ around some place you shouldn’ta been, actin’ like you knew you shouldn’ta been there.” She cut to the point. Her attempt at levity had failed and it wasn’t her strong point anyway.

“Dawn is not currently accepting contracts, Miss, nor will they for the duration of their stay upon this planet.” They looked down at their hand terminal and flicked a finger across it, the electronic sounds of a video game responding to the motion.

“Nah. You don’ get it. Yer breakin that fortress out of a behavior pattern. My boss thinks I did it, he’s firin’ me over it. Yer also breakin’ local law but I don’ care quite so much ‘bout that one.”

Dawn was quiet for a few moments, and finally they looked up at her slowly, an unreadable look in their eyes, but one that was unmistakably different from the poker face they’d been wearing. “Dawn does regret causing you harm, Miss, but there is little this one can do to atone for that harm.”

“That’s where yer wrong,” Nina huffed a little at the non-apology, and pulled out the data drive that she’d made on her way to visit the Neo-Venutian. She placed it on the table, then took out a Zenith encoder and hooked the two devices up. “This is yer Mech’s nav data. I need you to decrypt it for me so I can prove to my boss that yer not some stupid-named ghost. Ya also need me to remove the docking clamp I put on that stupid-lookin’ Mech of yers.” Breaking into the hangar where Dusk was stored had been tricky but not impossible. Dawn had chosen their hangar for discretion, something out of the way. It hadn’t been graced with the most iron-clad security Abrandia had to offer. The particular dock that housed Dusk had especially compromised security, though the docking administration had yet to realize it.

Dawn’s eyes went wide, and they stared at the little drive, going pale, if that were even possible considering how pale they already were. “You… went into Dusk’s hangar?”

“Piking right I did,” Nina smirked at the flabbergasted androgyn, reveling in her victory a little.

Dawn dived for the drive, trying to snatch it off the table, but Nina was too fast. She grabbed it before they could and moved it out of reach. Nina expected Dawn to beg a little, or try to grab it again, but instead they actually looked past Nina. Without a word of explanation, they pulled a hand-held Plasma caster out of… somewhere and extended their arm. Nina swore and reacted, both ducking down and kicking her chair backwards. The motion sent the flimsy plastic chair tumbling to the ground and she winced in pain as the air was forced out of her lungs. The weapon discharged with a hissing noise as a magnetically contained bubble of plasma streaked through the air towards its target, which apparently wasn’t Nina.

A van had been driving up the street towards them and Dawn had fired straight through the windshield. A sliding door on the side of the vehicle was thrown open and someone who was definitely a mercenary tumbled out holding an assault rifle. The Van itself crashed into a nearby building and crumpled a little, but not enough to do more than rattle the other passengers who hadn’t dived out. Nina bolted to her feet, taking a step back and looking over at Dawn who had aimed the weapon at her now.

There was a moment of silence as Dawn hesitated, and then winced and lowered the weapon. “They think you are Dawn’s contact. They will kill you.”

Nina looked over her shoulder, the mercenary who’d fallen out first was rising to his feet and two more were wobbling out of the ruined van. She didn’t take long to make up her mind, especially when one of them pointed at her and raised her weapon.

“Bereaver’s tits, go!” She pocketed the encrypted navigation data, and ran, following on Dawn’s heels. The two of them bolted off the balcony and around the corner as the goons’ rifles roared behind them. There was a soft whine as several bullets but into the wood and ceramic around them as they turned the corner. Nina suspected that the only reason they hadn’t been cut down in that initial volley was that the mercenaries were probably very disoriented from their crash.

“Dawn does not know the layout of this city,” They hissed softly at Nina as the two ran into the alley. Dawn turned around only for an instant to fire off a shot from their plasma caster. The weapon probably was a single-shot design optimized for taking out small robots and vehicles, and it would certainly struggle to deal with five goons armed with automatic rifles. Still, superheated plasma flying at a person was definitely enough to make one think twice.

“There’s some smugglin’ tunnels a few blocks away. We kin lose the goons in there.” Nina double checked their surroundings to make sure they were where she thought they were. “Can that thing of yers slag a welded plate open, actually?”

“Dawn will be very disappointed if it cannot,” they muttered, following behind Nina as the two of them dashed through the alleyways of Abrandia into the industrial district, even as city-wide alarms began to blare in response to the unauthorized small arms fire. Nina’s atheleticism allowed her to outpace Dawn to the next cover point almost immediately, and she turned around a little bit confused, seeing that Dawn was limping a little bit and struggling to move quickly.

Rifles popped and bullets whined as they impacted with the steel walls around the two of them as the mercenaries came into line of sight. Nina cursed and ducked instinctively, and she heard Dawn fire the plasma caster even as she scrambled around the edge of the warehouse they were next to in order to break the shooters’ line of sight. Dawn scrambled around the corner a moment later, and Nina muttered to herself as she looked around for the right building.

“There. That building,” She looked over at Dawn to make sure they were paying attention and froze for a moment. Dawn’s tidy, minimalistic white shirt and pants were soaking through with blood. Two bullets had struck Dawn in the leg, and another in their side. They were panting and groaning softly, the plasma caster hanging limply in their grip at their side. Nina stared at them for a few moments, feeling a cold chill settle over her.

She should leave them behind, let the Abrandia militia or the hit squad pick them up. She’d get away easily, and the worst she’d have to deal with would be Sam firing her, but Dawn’s death would possibly serve as proof of their interference anyway. She would never have resorted to killing the strange pilot to resolve her issue with Sam, not on her own. But this… all she had to do was run away and save herself.

“...Heck…” she muttered.

With one swift motion, Nina surged forward, using her superior strength and height to sweep the bleeding, weakened stranger off their feet and into her arms. Dawn put up no resistance, they just moaned softly in pain as she did. Warm blood soaked through Dawn’s clothes into Nina’s and she clutched them close as she bolted for the warehouse with the tunnel entrance.

“Ay, stay with me, enby,” Nina jostled Dawn gently when they went a little bit limp in her grasp. The plasma caster Dawn was still clutching in a death grip was probably Ascension-coded and Nina wouldn’t be able to fire it herself.

More alarms blared, announcing the arrival of the Abrandia militia. The sound filled Nina with both dread and relief. The militia showing up meant that their assailants would probably call off the chase, especially since they’d actually hit Dawn three times. It also meant that Nina had another group to avoid, since the militia catching her with a half-dead offworlder would definitely be a violation of her parole, even if this specific scenario wasn’t written into the agreement.

“Hey, hey, wakey wakey. Need ya to melt off this panel.” Nina shook Dawn again, directing their head towards the loading dock hatch that had been bolted shut since last year. Dawn looked at it sluggishly for several moments before they weakly raised their arm, pointing the plasma caster at the panel holding the dock shut. Nina quickly took a few steps back to create some distance, and Dawn fired, the superheated matter burning a hole through the panel. It wasn’t totally free, but it was close enough for Nina to give it a strong kick to break off the melted bits of steel still holding it shut. She pushed up the sliding door with one arm enough to duck under it, and let it slam closed behind her.

“...No… Hospital…” Dawn croaked weakly, tugging on Nina’s jacket and getting their bloody fingerprints all over it.

“No jokin’” Nina agreed grimly, finding an empty workbench in the dim light and setting Dawn down upon it. “They’d have questions neither one’a us wants to sit for.” Dawn nodded and groaned softly as Nina pulled out a multitool and used it to poke a hole in Dawn’s shirt. A few quick rips tore Dawn’s shirt off, revealing a compression undershirt beneath that was similarly stained red. It was actually keeping enough pressure on the wound in Dawn’s side that it wasn’t bleeding as profusely as it could have, and was quite possibly the reason they were still conscious. Nina ripped a few strips of cloth out of the shirt and used it to wrap and bind the bullet holes in Dawn’s leg just to slow the bleeding down. She gingerly tied another around the through-and-through in Dawn’s side even as they gasped in pain and squirmed on the surface of the bench.

“D-Dawn knows the young miss did not have to save them...” they breathed weakly as Nina finished applying the bandages and tossed the spare bits of blood-soaked cloth into a corner.

“Hrmph. S’fine. I need ya, after all.” Nina grumbled, and started looking around for the hatch that led into the tunnels beneath the industrial district. Her mind raced with ideas and possibilities of what she needed to do next. Keeping Dawn alive at all would be difficult and time-sensitive. She could try to find some unlicensed surgeon in the Abrandian underground but she had no more contacts there, she couldn’t pay them, and she probably couldn’t trust them, either. They had medical equipment back at Nina’s camp and Sam had enough medical background to treat bullet wounds, but getting there was the problem. She couldn’t exactly drive her bike through the checkpoint with a dying, bleeding person on the back, especially with the administrative lockdown that was sure to come.

“Yo, weirdo, do you think you could pilot that Mech of yers if I get ya to it?” she asked after she pried the rusty hatch open.

Dawn looked over at her from the work bench and blinked a few times, processing her question before answering. “Yes… Dusk has an auto-medic installed in the cockpit that could staunch the flow of Dawn’s blood. This one would not be combat ready but that should not be necessary.”

“An’ it’s stealth, right? It can slip past the checkpoint?” She went over to them and lifted them up, cradling them a little more gently in her arms this time and heading over to the hatch. It was dark inside the warehouse but it was darker still down the steep stairs into the tunnel.

“The authorities may notice Dusk’s passing, but should have difficulty giving pursuit.” Dawn exhaled softly, relaxing a little in Nina’s arms without going limp like they had before.

Nina grunted in response and turned on the light on her hand terminal to navigate her way through the dark, damp tunnels. She re-traced her steps fairly easily, having taken a similar route through a different entrance earlier that day. She arrived at another hatch that she’d apparently forgotten to close properly, and she easily shoved it open without having to put Dawn down. The hangar was empty of people, but the compact Mech, Dusk, took up the entire far wall. Dusk was about eight meters tall, standing a bit higher than Twinshya even though Twinshya was probably twice the size. It was humanoid like most ExSol-crafted Ascension Mechs, but somehow managed to be alien and foreign at the same time.

Every human-made Mech Nina had ever seen out of Abrandia had square, blocky frames with heavy armor plates and modular parts and weapon systems connected to the torso. Dusk was sleek, slender, and its weapon systems looked almost like strange, oversized growths emerging naturally from the humanoid frame. Dusk had no pieces that looked like a head attached directly to the torso, but the missile rack on the left shoulder looked almost like one that was just far too uncentered. The vibroblade was grafted onto the ‘elbow’ of the right arm and it extended far past the hand. It would have touched the ground if the limb was positioned differently. It was clearly able to pivot around it to get different cutting angles with a design Nina could barely even comprehend. The plasma caster on the left arm was the heaviest one she’d ever seen on a Mech that size and she wasn’t sure how its power grid could possibly supply it properly.

Nina helped dawn climb into the cockpit situated in the center of the Mech’s torso and stepped back as the hatch closed and auto-medic started to work. A short while later, the Mech’s external speakers came on as the machine powered up. “Thank you, Miss. There is a cargo compartment located upon Dusk’s back that you can ride in. This one regrets to say that the ride will be somewhat frigid, Dawn’s Zenith burns hotter than most and Dusk must cool itself to compensate.”

“Figures,” Nina muttered as she went over to the hangar’s control console and logged in with the dummy administrative account she’d hacked together earlier that day. She released the docking clamps on Dusk’s legs and the Mech stood up to its full height. It walked away from the dock’s far wall and then kneeled down, the aforementioned cargo hatch popping open for her. She groaned again when she saw that she would basically be riding in a trunk, and then, resigned to her fate, climbed in.

***

Dawn enabled Dusk’s stealth field immediately, even before the hangar door opened. Doing so was a tad risky, the Mech’s reactor couldn’t function at full capacity unless Dawn flared their Zenith harder, so they’d have to burn into the battery reserves to use functions like the stealth field. Firing their Ascension that hard would probably freeze the strange girl to death when Dusk’s cooling system compensated, though. Much as Dawn was prepared to let her die to finish the mission, it would be easier to get medical care from her colleagues if she was alive. Plus… it would be a burden on Dawn’s conscience that they didn’t much want.

Dusk slipped silently through the streets of Abrandia’s industrial district towards the city limits. With the stealth field on, they were almost completely invisible to radar scanners and only a human staring very intently looking for a strange shimmer in the air would be able to notice its presence. Several Abrandian militia patrols were moving around, questioning people and searching for the source of the disturbance. Dawn had no indication that they’d caught the assassins who had come for them, but they’d still detain and question Dawn if they found out they were the target. That kind of set back would keep Dawn impounded for weeks or months, and that was time they didn’t have. They moved swiftly but carefully towards the wall, avoiding groups of people and keeping enough distance so that people wouldn’t hear Dusk’s footsteps through the sound dampener or notice the telltale shimmer as it moved. Eventually, someone would notice the Mech’s movements. One could not move an eight-meter tall machine through a city without someone noticing.

Several people did seem to notice, turning and looking and squinting at Dusk as Dawn approached the wall. Perhaps the level of cultural awareness around the stealth technology was a factor that Dawn didn’t account for. On Neo-Venus, a security officer seeing a strange stealth shimmer would immediately sound the alarm, but these people just shook their heads and went back to what they were doing. It was when Dawn approached the city perimeter that Dusk’s stealth display lit up, confirming that an X-ray scanner had penetrated the stealth field. Fortunately, at this point, it was too late.

Dawn dropped the stealth field and activated the gravity manipulation to launch the mech up into the air and over the wall. Target locks started to resolve, and connection requests streamed in so rapidly that Dawn would have been overwhelmed with how to try to respond coherently even if they were so inclined. Dawn was ready to engage Dusk’s anti-missile capabilities, but there must have been a good amount bureaucratic confusion within the Militia’s ranks because no missiles came.

Dusk hit the ground running, subtly pulling itself forward with the gravity manipulators to improve its ground speed. The big lumbering Tempest Mech, Titan, was too far away to lock on with its Disintegration Beam, and Dawn had only to re-activate their stealth field once they were far enough away to render most other weapons ineffectual. Autocannon and plasma caster fire came from stationary emplacements around the city, peppering the ground around Dusk and testing the limits of its deflectors. Dusk’s power reserves dipped down to 30% and Dawn flared on their Zenith a little bit to alleviate the power drain. From within Dusk, Dawn heard the crass young woman curse and yell a little bit as the Mech’s heat sinks kicked themselves up a notch to compensate for Dawn’s increased body temperature.

Abrandia’s military was purely defensive, and was ill-equipped to deal with a fleeing stealth Mech, so the pursuit dropped off almost immediately. Dawn took their machine up into the hills towards the Talon fortress and dropped the stealth field, lowering the Mech’s power drain to essential systems only.

“Sounds like we’re clear,” The crass young woman’s muffled voice came from within the storage compartment.

“Dawn…” Dawn wanted to say something in return, but a jolt of pain ripped through them as they spoke. They flipped over to the auto-medic readout and saw that their blood pressure was still dropping well below what it should be. Instead, they simply typed ‘Yes’ into a text-to-speech engine and let the robotic voice ring throughout the Mech’s interior as an answer.

By the time Dusk walked up to the edge of the wrecked observatory that was the crass young woman’s camp, Dawn could feel themselves fading. Power reserves were at 8% simply because Dawn had not fired back on their Zenith for the crass young woman’s safety, and a horrifically outdated and patchwork Pulse Mech was approaching them along with a connection request. Rather than try to speak, Dawn simply lowered Dusk to its knees, powered it down, unlocked the storage compartment housing the crass young woman, and allowed themselves to slip from consciousness.

***  
Himiko Yamane drummed her fingers on her desk as the two people she’d called into her office got settled and did one quick check through the files in their respective hand terminals. Wasseim was a tall, lanky man with thinning yet greasy hair. He was, in some capacity, in charge of the Abrandia militia. Shayala was Abrandia’s foreign minister and had been occupying that position for decades, far before Himiko had even been working for the government, let alone running it.

“Knight-Major,” Himiko looked at Wasseim and addressed him by his title to indicate that he could speak.

“Ye. We rounded up two of the gunners. Caught ‘em trying to flee the district on foot. Didn’t get far with their vehicle in the state it was. I saw the interro myself, both of ‘em flipped pretty fast. Either they’re ace black ops feedin’ us a story, or just some local badgers willin’ to hoist a slug thrower for a clip.” Wasseim rambled on about the incident with a goofy grin on his face like he was talking about a party he’d just come from.

“Do we have any leads on who hired them?” Himiko asked, keeping the Knight-Major fixated with a cool gaze to keep his leash taut.

“Ye. Looks like it was one of the ‘davers in the vehicle. She and it, they look like they got fragged with a heckin caster of all things. Not tot’ sure how that happened. We runnin’ tests on the scoring.” Wasseim snickered at that a little and Himiko’s frown did little to dissuade his attitude.

She nodded to him even as she took a few quiet moments to puzzle the meaning out of his stupid slang. It was a source of eternal frustration that part of her job seemed to be teaching government officials to not talk like teenagers, but now was not the time to derail the meeting. “And what were they supposedly hired to do?”

“Crack some Zenith-head ‘n swipe their terminal. They were pretty foggy on the details. Gonna squeeze ‘em harder for those. I’ll have more details as soon as I can, GovGen.” Wasseim winked at her and Himiko scowled at the abhorrent truncation of her title.

“Do you have any information on this transient, Minister?” Himiko turned away from the socially oblivious Wasseim and addressed Shayala.

“Do I ever.” Shayala sighed, sifting through some files on her terminal. She flicked an image onto one of the displays in Himiko’s office and it lit up with an image of what appeared to be an official-looking piece of identification. “Transient’s name is Dawn, they rode in on a Mech that they registered as Dusk. I know, I know, I checked to see if it was an alias. I interviewed the customs agent that registered this pilot and they said that this had no means of verifying whether or not the identification was legitimate but the Mech’s navigation log did confirm that it was from Neo-Venus. I’ve gotten confirmation that the navigation logs don’t look forged but we’re going to keep running tests.”

“How can we possibly not have any idea whether or not this is legitimate?” Himiko asked, studying the picture that Shayala had thrown onto the screen.

“Neo-Venus is anywhere between four to ten trips gate-to-gate. We’ve literally never had official contact with what passes for government over there, just rumours and stories. I dug through records and couldn’t find a single thing to compare this identification to.”

“So…” Himiko said, scowling at the two of them. “Do either of you have an idea how this person fled the city in this Mech of theirs?”

“Stealth field,” Wasseim explained, leaning back in his chair. “Techs are combing over the sensor data. Sounds like this Mech out-gleams everything but Titan. Even then, might be close.”

“And why exactly did we let a military-grade stealth Mech into the city completely unsupervised?” Himiko asked.

“Someone either slothed out, hecked up, or took a coin.” Wasseim answered cheerfully, much to the displeasure of both women.

“Customs agents not doing their jobs should be a great concern to us all and not a joke, Knight-Captain,” Shayala looked over at him, accusing him no doubt in the hopes that none of this failure would blow back onto her.

“Ay, not sayin’ its not a concern, Shay. Full hardware audits of every machine that comes through ‘ere aint ‘xactly easy as pettin’ a fox. Can’t expect underpaid customs shrews to do counter-intel work for us.” As Wasseim spoke, his hand terminal chimed softly and he looked down at it. “Oho. Facial recognition came back with the woman helpin’ the Zenith-head. Nina Sahara, juv del, former Smithson Cartel, Pulse Ascension, on parole, works outside the city somewhere.”

“Can you bring her in?” Himiko asked.

“Parole docs usually don’t cover espionage, but ye, if I can find her I’ll get her. See what she knows. Sounds like maybe she works for one of the scavvers out there. I’ll ask around.” Wasseim spoke with a little more focus as he looked through the accomplice’s file. He sent the file to Himiko and Shayala a moment later, and then stood up.

Himiko waved to him to indicate that he could go and Wasseim gave a quick salute before he took off, already talking to someone through his terminal before he was even outside of the office.

“I want to know what this pilot is doing here and who sent them, Minister,” Himiko addressed Shayala icily.

“I’ve got a few meetings planned. Someone in my network of contacts knows someone from Neo-Venus. As far as who tried to have them killed, well, I’ve got a short list and it only has one name on it.”

“Hallucia, I assume?”

“Of course. The fact that there’s no hardware audit of this machine is probably why they were so interested, too.” Shayala sighed and shook her head, looking annoyed. “This Mech comes in, no hardware audit, almost no document trail, looks like a ghost to them. They probably thought we were the ones trying to keep it quiet. No surprise they’d look into it and consider taking out the pilot so we can’t use it.”

“And the connection to this Sahara girl?” Himiko asked, sharing in Shayala’s displeasure.

“Wrong place wrong time? Hired help? Neo-Venutian asset? Could just as easily be any of those. We’ll have to scoop her up to get a better guess. As far as grabbing this operative, all three of the Gate outposts on the continent have been alerted to watch for them and I’m talking to the Hallucian government to ask for their passage logs around their Gate but I doubt they’ll co-operate. I’m sorry Governor General, but the truth is that If this operative wants to get off-world then they may already be far beyond our reach.”

“I figured. Something about this incident doesn’t sit right with me. I want people in custody and I want them talking.” Himiko gave Shayala a look every bit as frigid as the one she’d given Wasseim. She wanted the Minister to know that she wanted results, not another political maneuver to pin blame on the militia. “You’re dismissed. I want an update as soon as you have it, Shayala.”

“Of course, Governor General.”

***

One week ago…

Dawn sat cross-legged in their little domed garden, watching the green glittering of the light of Neo-Venus’ star scattering across the atmosphere. They closed their eyes, settling themselves, centering themselves, letting go of all their worldly concerns. Their mission and the various aspects of it slipped into their mind, and they let it go. The details slipped away, Dawn’s mind too still and calm for such complicated things to find purchase. Slowly, the barely audible howl of Neo-Venus’ winds were drowned out. The warmth and humidity of the indoor garden barely noticeable. Dawn was alone with only themselves in the void.

Nothing came for a while. Dawn remained detached for a while, at peace with the world. Dawn’s anxieties about the mission didn’t rise up. They’d trained for this mission, prepared for every contingency. They’d literally been born for this mission. Nothing should have bothered Dawn. This meditation should have been as easy as the hundreds they’d done growing up, perhaps should have been on-par with some of the more difficult ones over the past year. But no, she always wormed her way into Dawn’s darkest thoughts, Dawn’s nightmares and paranoid moments.

And that was all it took. Dawn’s mind returned to Emilia and her torments, her humiliations. Dawn tried to brush them off, to be still and empty and let the thoughts slip away, but they returned again and again. Emilia and her “sessions” with Dawn. With a sigh, Dawn gave up, opening their eyes and looking up at the sunset. Neo-Venus’ short ten hour day was almost over. Four hours of light, six of dark. Several sunsets and sunrises every day.

Dawn wondered if Emilia would come to them, tonight. It would be the last night she could, before Dawn left on the mission to Ishtar. Perhaps to die and never to come back. Perhaps to be reassigned and never be on the same planet as her again. It was both a hopeful thought and a terribly melancholy one. Dawn would have stopped Emilia the first time she’d come in to torment them. They probably would have stopped her even now, if they could. But there was some dark part of Dawn that had grown accustomed to her visits. Emilia paid a perverse sort of attention to Dawn completely independent of their ability to pilot a Mech. There was also no denying that Dawn got off on what she did. Whether that was an unintended side-effect of Dawn’s conditioning, or just a quirk of their psyche, they couldn’t tell.

An hour passed. Two. Darkness settled completely upon the room and Dawn glanced at their hand terminal to see the time. They were scheduled to be in bed in seventy minutes. Emilia could certainly show up after that, she could appear whenever she wanted, but Dawn would still go to bed on time if she didn’t show up. The clock had ticked down to fifty five minutes before bed, when dawn heard the door to their quarters open unbidden.

Dawn didn’t know it was Emilia. Several people had the keycode to access Dawn’s quarters. Unlike Emilia, most of them were supposed to have it. But nobody ever came. Dawn was summoned when they were needed. Dawn was assigned training drills and appointments, nobody came here but Emilia; Dawn didn’t get social visits.

“Hey, Sewer, you’re fuckin’ leaving tomorrow, I just saw,” Emilia’s voice came from directly behind Dawn, and they felt a shiver of dread pass through them. Dawn’s fists clenched in their lap, and they lowered their head a little bit. Why were they nervous? Emilia did this all the time. Now was no different... except that it was maybe the last time.

“Hey!” Emilia walked in a circle, standing in front of dawn with a wide posture, her hands balled into fists. “Look at me!”

Swallowing, Dawn raised their head. Emilia had short, blonde, messy hair that fell in pieces around her cute, delicate features. Features that were contrasted by a demanding, angry expression that was a permanent fixture for her, except for when she was around her father. He was the president of the Reunification Commission and de-facto ruler of the planet, and she was flawless in his eyes. Dawn met her eyes, swallowed again, and nodded.

“And you didn’t fuckin tell me, huh? You thought you could slip away without me knowing?” she asked. Dawn didn’t answer. Their thoughts on the matter were confused and muddled, not deliberate in the way Emilia was implying. With an annoyed huff, Emilia grabbed Dawn by the collar of their uniform and dragged them onto their feet and out of the garden. Dawn followed, feeling impotently annoyed with themselves for not resisting any more, but they knew that resisting her was purely symbolic. Emilia dragged Dawn into their bedroom, away from the window to the outside where someone might see the two of them.

“Miss Emilia, ple—”

Emilia raised the little device in her other hand and flicked a switch, creating a subtle low-frequency sound. “Knight, Seven, Tertiary, Gray, Philosopher.” she recited. The words underlaid by the thrumming sound of the audio playback cut into Dawn’s mind like a knife, and they reeled at the impact of it. No matter how many times Emilia did this, it was always a shock, always a surreal experience. Emilia let go of Dawn’s uniform and crossed her arms. “Get on your fucking knees.”

Dawn’s body responded automatically, collapsing down onto their knees so fast it stung. They still had no idea how Emilia had gained access to their hypnotic trigger, only the President and Dawn’s handler were supposed to be able to read that file. It could have been as innocuous as a computer screen left unattended, it could have been a serious security breach.

“You’re fucking disgusting, you know that?” Emilia sneered down at Dawn, tossing the playback device off to the side.

Dawn looked up at Emilia, struggling. Words formed half on their own, but Dawn also forced them out as the only tiny defiance they could muster. “...yes.”

smack

Emilia slapped Dawn across the face, hard. The impact might have sent Dawn to the floor, but the weight of Emilia’s command was still foremost in Dawn’s thoughts and they remained on their knees using a lifetime of pilot’s training.

“You piece of garbage. You’re not supposed to talk to me, you’re only supposed to do one thing when I ask you a question. What is it?” Emilia snarled angrily. Dawn did know. It had been all they could do not to follow her earlier instructions, but Dawn’s trigger didn’t quite work that way. Emilia couldn’t completely imprint commands onto Dawn that persisted from session to session, but it had still been difficult to disobey in even that tiny way.

Dawn looked up at Emilia, and opened their mouth, sticking their tongue out as far as they could. “That’s fuckin’ right,” Emilia huffed, and then made a rumbling noise in the back of her throat. She spat a wad of saliva and slime right onto Dawn’s outstretched tongue, and then sneered down at them expectantly. Part of Dawn wanted to let it slide off their tongue and onto the ground, but the weight of Emilia’s words echoing against the subtle thrum of her playback device were irresistible. Dawn retracted their tongue, swallowed the gob of spit, and then opened their mouth again, obediently sticking out their tongue.

“So fuckin’ nauseating,” Emilia said with unconcealed derision. Dawn wondered what was different today. Emilia was always hostile, always called Dawn these things and always did these things to them, but she wasn’t normally angry. She was normally cold, arrogant, sometimes gleefully sadistic, but almost never angry. Was Emilia actually upset that Dawn was leaving? That made no sense, she must have known that Dawn would leave eventually. Dawn was a pilot, and Dusk was a long-range espionage Mech. If Emilia had access to Dawn’s hypnotic trigger, she surely had access to Dawn’s mission dossier.

Dawn didn’t respond to Emilia’s comment, they kept their mouth wide open with their tongue hanging out as Emilia had ordered. Even if they could have denied Emilia’s accusation, it would be a superficial denial. The trickle of arousal between Dawn’s thighs was undeniable. Dawn knew it was there and that their cunt would only get wetter as Emilia continued to abuse them. Worse was the fact that Emilia knew it too.

Emilia watched her for a moment, eyes narrowed. “Get on your back, Sewer,” she ordered as she undid the buckle of her pants. Their mouth locked in the lewd, gaping position that Emilia had specified, Dawn lowered themselves to the floor, lying flat down on their back. A moment later, Emilia appeared in Dawn’s vision, kneeling with their head between her knees, her pants and panties gone, assuming she’d been wearing any of the latter in the first place. With no warning and no restraint, Emilia dropped her weight pussy-first onto Dawn’s face. The acrid taste of residual urine assaulted Dawn’s tongue and they winced a little as Emilia gyrated her hips on Dawn’s face. A moment later, Dawn realized that Emilia had almost certainly come straight here after having sex with someone else - probably her boyfriend but not necessarily just him. Dawn swirled their tongue across Emilia’s sex, drawing a small pleasured grunt out of her. Emilia would often sit on Dawn’s face like this for an hour or more until Dawn was drenched in sweat and cum and their tongue ached terribly. Today, Emilia raised herself up after only a few minutes without even taking the time to cum on Dawn’s face. She twisted, reorienting herself to face towards Dawn’s feet instead of away. Her ass came down on Dawn’s face where her pussy had been a moment ago and she squirmed and twisted to wedge Dawn’s face as deep between into her crack as it could go. Dawn was trapped in the darkness of Emilia’s prominent ass cheeks, and Emilia pressed her weight down hard to put her asshole in direct contact with Dawn’s tongue.

“You soaked yet, Sewer?” Emilia asked with a soft grunt of relaxation. She pressed her weight down on Dawn’s face as she raised one of her feet up and dropped her heel onto Dawn’s cunt, kicking them firmly in the crotch. Dawn moaned and twitched involuntarily as Emilia roughly ground her heel into their cunt. The force and pain of Dawn’s arousal flooded their entire body in much the same way that the shame did. “Yep. Foot’s damp through your fucking uniform.” Emilia laughed cruelly, lifting her foot for just a moment to inspect it before she started to roughly and erratically bounce her heel onto Dawn’s cunt, the lack of a proper rhythm preventing Dawn from building up for an orgasm of their own.

Emilia grunted again, her asshole flexing outward a little and Dawn felt a surge of dread hit them when they realized she was pushing. Dawn wanted to shove Emilia off of them or at least to close their mouth, but the weight of Emilia’s commands still paralyzed them, kept their mouth open and tongue out. Emilia’s asshole pushed outwards again and farted out a gob of thick liquid onto Dawn’s tongue which filled them with an immediate sense of relief since it was just cum. It was probably her boyfriend’s cum from earlier in the day but could just as easily have been from one of a half dozen of her casual partners, or even some random person she’s met for specifically this reason. More oozed out and Dawn sucked and licked on the tight ring of muscle. Emilia laughed at Dawn’s meek hypnotically-induced subservience and continued to casually kick them in the cunt, endlessly amused at Dawn’s groans and twitches.

“You’re so gross. I can’t believe you get wet doing this. Does the hypnotic trigger even still work? I bet you just pretend, you love this so much.” Emilia snickered, giving Dawn a particularly firm kick that drew a muffled howl out of them. Dawn’s hands seized up and twitched, their body wanting to curl up into a fetal position to push away the pain and the dreadful pleasure of Emilia’s abuse. Dawn wanted to defy her suggestion that the hypnotism wasn’t working, so faced with the reality of being unable to control their own body, but even if they could, their face was so deep up Emilia’s ass it wouldn’t have been possible to do anything other than let out a muffled mumble

The pleasure thrumming through Dawn’s body wasn’t rising up to any kind of satisfying peak, but their cunt was starting to get sore and to ache. Normally Emilia didn’t abuse their genitalia so hard so quickly, but today she acted with a sort of vindictive purpose, her actions moving towards some goal that Dawn couldn’t fathom. Dawn had never been much for understanding people’s motivations, and certainly didn’t know what Emilia’s were aside from a sheer sense of sadism.

Emilia grunted again, her ass pushing out and releasing another spurt of cum onto Dawn’s tongue. With the amount that had been stored in her rectum, it became clear that more than one load had been shot up there, which explained why she’d been so eager to get her ass over Dawn’s mouth. This recent spurt tasted different, though, there was an underlying bitterness to it and Dawn retched violently as their imagination ran wild at what the difference might be, much as it might be nothing but their own imagination.

“Dont you dare fucking puke on me,” Emilia hissed angrily. Immediately, Dawn’s gag reflex responded to the order and went away. It seemed wrong to Dawn that their trigger should be able to suppress something that seemed like it should be autonomic but they felt their stomach settle anyway as Emilia continued to feed Dawn the tainted cum in her ass. “Disgusting bitch,” Emilia murmured to herself, her body vibrating gently. Dawn realized that she must be jilling herself off, getting off on the sensation of Dawn licking her ass. That, and the fact that Dawn knew very well that Emilia got off on abusing them just in general. She stopped kicking Dawn in the cunt as she masturbated and Dawn was both flooded with relief and frustration. Emilia’s weight on Dawn’s face intensified as she leaned back, humming softly to herself. Dawn exercised a little of the free will Emilia had left them and sucked on her recently-fucked hole a little harder, hoping to assist their tormentor along.

Emilia’s legs trembled, her weight shifted into an uncomfortable crushing pressure, and the string of muttered comments about how repulsive Dawn was trailed off. She stayed like that for several moments, body still gyrating subtly to the rhythm of her hand rubbing against her pussy. Eventually, as Dawn’s air ran out and they started to choke on Emilia’s ass, she rolled backwards and fell off, breathing heavily. Dawn gasped and coughed, the taste some stranger’s cum and whatever else had been in Emilia’s rectum still staining their tongue and no doubt splayed across their face as well. Shortly afterwards, Dawn’s face moved almost of its own accord, their mouth opening wide and tongue sticking out as Emilia had ordered. There was some extra level of perversity to that, Dawn thought. Emilia probably wouldn’t even notice they’d done it, now that she’d cum. But still, Dawn’s body obeyed, driven to follow her commands compulsively.

“Alright,” Emila said with a soft gasp. “Now, lets make sure that nasty cunt of yours is good and bruised so that you won’t forget who owns you while you’re away.” Dawn trembled in fear and despair as Emilia slowly rose up to her feet and walked around Dawn’s prone figure. “Open your legs,” the words came and Dawn’s body obeyed but they barely seemed to hear them. Emilia had her shoes back on, Dawn winced before the first blow was struck.

Thump, thump, thump.

Dawn cried out, wailing as best they could with their face frozen into the pose Emilia had demanded. “Keep quiet,” she hissed as she kicked Dawn’s cunt again, the synthetic leather stinging and leaving Dawn’s sensitive sex burning. In spite of the order, some tiny squeals and grunts still came out of Dawn’s mouth, forced out completely beyond the trigger’s ability to hold them back. Emilia sneered at Dawn and took a step forward, tilting her foot down and aiming a series of quick, steady kicks that made Dawn’s body explode in tortured pleasure. The orgasm that swept through them wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it still carried with it a sort of horrid masochistic thrill that felt like an unwanted invader in Dawn’s mind. It lasted too long, carried out and extended by Emilia’s continued assault. She was relentless, venting some misplaced anger upon Dawn’s cunt, kicking them until the world slowly faded away.

Dawn wasn’t sure when they passed out, the next thing they were aware of was a terrible ache all throughout their lower body and the water being splashed in their face. They looked up, seeing Emilia fully dressed and standing over them with a glass of water in her hand.

“You alive? Speak.” she asked, looking more concerned for herself than she was for Dawn.

Dawn groaned softly, feeling their body move a little under their own volition. They still heard the low thrum of the playback device on their own bed but they recognized immediately that the loss of consciousness seemed to have freed them from the hypnotic suggestion, or at least, from the commands Emilia had issued up until now. “Dawn is alive, Miss Emilia,” they whispered softly.

“Good. You remember who owns your worthless hide out there, Sewer.” Emilia scowled down at Dawn but somehow, her words seemed to lack a bit of their normal bite. Perhaps that was the pain and dizziness talking, though. Emilia walked over to the bed and grabbed her playback device, disabling and pocketing it, and then leaving without another word.

Dawn slowly got back up, peeling their soiled uniform off and throwing it into the laundry. Getting changed into a new one was a bit of a chore, their legs were still wobbly and weak, and the soreness in their crotch made putting on the snug flight suit almost unbearable. Dawn limped into their garden, finding the discarded hand terminal and picking it up. They were supposed to have been in bed an hour ago, so now they’d be sleep deprived as well as heavily bruised. With a small grunt, Dawn put in a request to push the mission itinerary back twenty minutes. It would probably be denied, but they figured it was worth a try. Dawn crawled onto their bed overtop of the covers, and tossed the hand terminal onto the nightstand. Dawn’s attempt to get some sleep was slow and punctuated by several painful adjustments. But it did come, eventually, blissfully.

***

Nina unstrapped herself from the frigid storage locker and hopped down to the ground with a less-than-graceful plummet that almost ended with her laying flat on her face. She stumbled to her knees instead, shivering with stiff muscles. She heard a familiar soft whirring noise not far ahead of her, and she looked up to see Twinshya glowing red and aiming its gauss cannon at Dusk warily. Nina scrambled to her feet and waved her arms, trying to get Carrina’s attention before she shot the defenseless Mech out of paranoia.

“Nina? Mercy, what’s going on?” Carrina’s voice came through her hand terminal unbidden, using her administrative override.

“S’alright, no hostile. Pilot’s hurt, gonna take ‘em to the auto-doc.” She looked back at Dusk and saw the cockpit door had opened. Dawn was inside and unconsciously slumped in their seat as the Mech’s auto-medic fussed with their body, doing what it was capable of.

“I’m gonna need a better explanation than that,” Nina could hear the bitchy scowl on Carrina’s face but she paid it no heed as she climbed up to the cockpit and unstrapped Dawn’s unconscious form.

“When nobody’s dyin’ I’ll spew what li’l I know.” Nina replied as she awkwardly climbed back down and started walking briskly past Twinshya even as the Mech loomed ominously overhead.

“Fine. Meet you there.” Carrina relented right before she Counter-Pulsed and Twinshya shifted into defense mode, red glow fading down to the cool reflective black of the Mech’s usual colouring.

Nina carried Dawn through their compound to the medical center and laid them down on the padded surface for the auto-doc. The machine hummed to life and Nina barked some voice commands at it. “Slug wounds. Blood loss.” Still, the machine cut away some of Dawn’s clothes and connected a few sensors to run tests and quickly verify Nina’s assertion. When that was done it inserted a few needles and started pumping Dawn full of synthetic replacement blood and started to bind and mend the tissue damage. A few minutes later, it beeped at her and informed her that the patient’s chances were good, and Nina sighed in relief. Immediately after that, it started registering other injuries, a few scrapes, cuts, and extensive partially-healed bruising around their groin that explained why they’d been limping. Nina suddenly felt bad that she’d treated the pilot the way she had, they’d clearly undergone something traumatic to leave bruising like that.

Sam entered the room not long after, a confused expression oh his face that was looking for an excuse to morph into rage and indignation. “Who the heck is this and why is there a weird Mech parked just outside my facility and… Why.”

“Long tale. Gon’ wait till ‘rina gets here to tell it.” Nina answered and tried not to smirk. Truthfully she really didn't care about re-telling the story she just wanted a plausible excuse to make Sam squirm.

Carrina didn’t keep the two of them waiting long, she walked through the doors a few minutes later after presumably docking Twinshya on the other side of the facility and walking over to the medical center. “So, this is… Dawn?” Carrina asked.

“You are not trying to tell me that this story about a Neo-Venutian Zenith pilot is actually real. I am not–” Sam tried to bluster a little bit, but he looked at Dawn again, and trailed off.

“I found it a little hard to believe too, Sam, but that Mech out there is the real deal and this person is clearly a Zenith pilot.” Carrina walked over to the auto-doc display and checked it for herself to see the machine’s estimation of whether or not Dawn would survive.

“Ye. Butterfly found ‘em sittin’ at a place in Abrandia and I went to gift a visit. Some goons showed up, tried to crack the both of us. Check the news feeds if you want proof.” Nina stood up, utilizing her height and physical form to push a bit of intimidation. She had her vindication, she intended to use it.

“So they’ve been harassing the Talon fortress, then?” Carrina asked, a kind of half-grimace on her face as she acknowledged Nina’s accounting of Dawn’s actions as truth.

“Ye. Can’t say why. Gon’ ask though.” Nina watched Sam closely as she spoke, so closely that there was no way he didn’t notice. She wanted him to squirm a little, wanted him to feel bad for how he’d been treating her lately.

“We’ll review your probation, if this pans out,” Sam muttered, looking away. He walked up to the auto-doc and cycled through a few diagnostics and menus. A short while later, Dawn groaned and opened their eyes.

“Is it really necessary to wake them up so soon?” Carrina asked, sounding a little mortified that Sam had gone and stimmed them awake.

“It’s safe,” Sam replied, answering the unspoken question and leaving the spoken one implied.

“Patient requests painkiller,” Dawn’s voice sounded groggy yet somehow still aware and disciplined. Nina was about to admonish Sam for denying Dawn’s request, but to her surprise the machine beeped in acknowledgement and a needle shot into their arm before he could. Nina wasn’t familiar with the administrative functions on the auto-doc but apparently Dawn knew what requests from the patient the machine would respond do. Then again, maybe that was just a feverish guess on their part.

“You wanna tell us what in the worlds is going on?” Sam demanded of Dawn angrily even as Dawn sighed softly, the painkiller no doubt having some effect already.

“This one has been under observation by the ones who sent those shooters, Dawn believes their true goal was this one’s contact within Abrandia. When the young miss was seen leaving Dawn’s hangar and then meeting with them, they believed her to be their target.” Dawn spoke in a measured voice that recaptured some of their earlier calmness and inscrutability.

“Who do you work for? Who was coming after you?” Carrina pressed.

“Much as this one is imminently grateful for your assistance, they are not authorized to explain their mission.” Dawn exhaled tiredly and closed their eyes again, but didn’t quite fall back asleep. No doubt that would actually be impossible so long as the auto-doc was gently stimming them.

“Care to tell ‘rina and Sam what you’ve been up to in that fancy Mech o’ yers?” Nina asked.

“Dawn has been engaging in military action against Talon,” They replied. Nina was a little surprised that they admitted it so readily. “This one has been tasked with retrieving a specific piece of technology from the large facility here on Ishtar.”

“And of course you can’t tell us what you’re trying to retrieve,” Sam grumbled, crossing his arms and scowling.

“No. But Dawn is willing to offer recompense for their prior transgressions, their host’s current acts of altruism, and perhaps future cooperation.”

“Generous of ya to only offer not to squeeze us after I drag yer body through a tunnel,” Nina rolled her eyes.

“This one would argue that their situation would be far less dire had the young miss not interfered in the first place. Regardless, fate and circumstances flow as water. Dawn does not provide or request justifications, Dawn accepts that they are adrift. A chance to rest would be appreciated, however…” Dawn’s voice grew weak and exhausted even as they waxed poetic.

“Sounds settled. Let the poor enby rest,” Carrina shot Nina and Sam a concerned frown and went to the auto-doc and changed a setting to stop it from stimming Dawn to keep them awake. With a soft groan, they closed their eyes and their breathing fell back into a steady rhythm.

“This is a total disaster. We should just thank Agrianna that nobody got hurt and call the governor to let her sort this out.” Carrina looked over at the two of them once she’d made sure that Dawn was unconscious.

“What? Screw that. Himiko will just arrest this weirdo, Talon’s pattern will break and we’ll get screwed over. If they can’t pay us directly, then Twinshya and that other Mech can bust up some camp, they can have whatever bauble they want and we can cash in on the rest. We call Himiko and we get nothing. Hell, she might even just throw obstruction charges at us if she’s in a bad mood.” Nina winced as Sam ranted. Mostly because she actually agreed with him and she hated it when that happened.

“That Mech is the gleam of the gates, boss. It can help us hit targets that Twinshya never could. Mebbe we can round up some scrap and I can actually replace autocannons five ‘n six. Could get the conduit to fix the deflectors ‘fore some stray round wiggles through em and turns normal Carrina into Car and Rina.”

Carrina scowled at the two of them, clearly not fond of their input. “We’ll talk about it.” She finally conceded with a look at Sam which meant that the two would argue about it once Nina was out of the room. Nina was happy to indulge her bosses in their desire to be rid of her and she slipped out of the room before they could think of any other topics to raise with her.

***

Talon didn’t think, it evaluated. It analyzed positions, obstacles, resources, and assets. It itemized various courses of action and sent them off to the Administrator so that the Administrator could guide its actions. No response came from the Administrator. No response had come in a very long time.

This didn’t affect Talon’s functions at all. Talon was designed to assist the Administrator. There was no contingency to be followed in the case of the Administrator’s extended absence. Instead, Talon chose a course of actions from its list, one not too risky or aggressive, and then it continued to evaluate.

And as it analyzed, it detected a pattern.

An assailant from had struck several outposts in succession upon world 3-205023. The possibility that the assailant was seeking Talon’s Gate codes had just exceeded 13.2%. A parameter changed. Priorities changed. Talon began to mobilize its forces upon 3-205023. Gate code theft was against the treatise. Protection of Gate codes was a high priority directive in the absence of Administrator commands.

Talon began to hunt for assailant with increased priorities.


	3. Nazmiya/???

Naz traced her fingers along the outline of Marielle’s collarbone.  The older woman continued to pay her no heed, her fingers tapping steadily on a keypad and eyes fixated upon the diagnostic screen in front of her.  She decided to escalate a little, leaning forward on Marielle’s shoulder and running her fingers along the side of her lover’s neck.

 

“Naz, I know– aaah!” Marielle squeaked a little as Naz dragged the finely kept nails of her left hand a little more firmly against Marielle’s tender skin.  She wished that she was able to have _all_ of her nails like that, but the compromise she’d arrived at with Miya was that she made aesthetic decisions about the left hand and Miya got the right.

 

“Do any know?” Naz asked, smiling softly as Marielle squirmed a little and finally tore her gaze away from her work.

 

“Yes, sweetie, ‘any’ does know that you want my attention.” Marielle looked over at her with a coy smile and deliberately interlocked the fingers of her biological hand with Naz’ so that she couldn’t prod or tickle her.  She raised an eyebrow at Naz, inviting her to elaborate on her cryptic comment in spite of the sarcastic answer Marielle had given.

 

“Only guessing… belief…” Naz grinned, leaning in and kissing Marielle on the cheek.  “You believe my desire…?”

 

Marielle snorted out a soft laugh.  “I _know_ you want my attention, kit.”  She reached up, threading her mechanical fingers through Naz’ fine hair and scratching at her scalp until Naz hummed softly and closed her eyes.  Marielle used her complacent state to gently dislodge Naz and set her down on the seat next to Marielle’s desk that wasn’t her own. When Naz opened her eyes, Marielle was sitting back down at her desk, glancing back at her screen.

 

“And as much as I’d love to blow off work and pay attention to you, I’ve got a deadline to meet.” Marielle gave Naz a sad smile and went back to tapping away at her keypad.

 

Naz decided to leave her alone, and went into her own hand terminal to pull up some vocal exercises.  Before long, the rhythmic sound of Marielle tapping on her keypad was drowned out by the accompanying music coming out of Naz’ hand terminal and her singing and following the instructions of the vocal drills.   When she and Miya were alone, she often sang softly and tried to follow along with the melody of Tempest surging inside of her, but she felt like she could not do it justice. If human beings could sense and interpret Tempest as music, then she figured there must be a reason for it.  She accepted and embraced the reality that no matter how deeply she believed, she may never advance either her or the ExSol’s understanding of Tempest by even a little. But even accepting that, she believed there was more to understand, and perhaps knowing more about music would play some small part.

 

“Naz, sweetie?” Marielle raised her voice to get Naz’ attention, and she looked over at Marielle, realizing that she’d been lost in thought.

 

“...Yes?”

 

“Your terminal is beeping, kit.” Marielle smiled at her and gestured towards the little piece of technology sitting in Naz’ lap.  Sure to her comment, the music and voice drills had stopped, interrupted by the repetitive beeping of an incoming connection request.  Naz stared at it for a few seconds before Miya’s exasperation rose to the surface and she answered the call.

 

“Yeah?” Miya asked.

 

“Ay, Miya.” Wasseim greeted her, recognizing Miya by tone alone.  “Y’secure?”

 

“Mari’s here,” Miya responded, glancing up at Naz’ girlfriend who was pointedly ignoring her.

 

“Hey, Marielle, what’s yer clearance level again?” Wasseim asked, raising his voice a little.

 

“Ninety four, I think?” Marielle answered absently.  “I’m not really listening anyway, I’m busy.”

 

“Ugh. close ‘nuff,” Wasseim sighed impatiently.  Miya scowled at that comment. He was the one always lecturing her about security protocols, after all.  “GovGen wants us to brief ‘bout a long-range mission fer ya. Come ‘round office four, prep the manifests ye’d need.”  It wasn’t really a question and he didn’t phrase it like one.

 

“Inbound, Uncle,” Naz replied cheerfully, closing the connection.  She went over to kiss Marielle on the cheek, earning a smile and an affectionate hand-squeeze from her partner before Marielle went back to her work.

 

Office four, as it was called, wasn’t terribly far from Marielle’s house and worshop, so Naz opted to walk.  As she made her way through the quiet streets, her terminal buzzed again with an anxiety-laden text message from her uncle asking her when she’d be arriving.  She ignored it, since she was only a few minutes away anyway.

 

“Natalya,” Naz greeted the soldier working the door and she gave a nod of acknowledgement as she punched in the security code to admit her.

 

“Knight Major is in the conference room,” Natalya said, opening the door for her.

 

“Unseen Blessing,” Naz touched Natalya on the arm as she walked past her into the building.  Someone else was posted just outside the door to the conference room, and as he spotted Naz he cracked the door opened and whispered something to the occupants.  As Naz approached, he nodded at her and opened the door for her. Her uncle was inside, as Naz expected, but there was someone else inside as well.

 

“Captain Nazmiya,” Himiko Yamane, the Governor General and head of the Abrandian state addressed them by their combined name. She was sitting there with a cup of tea gently steaming on a coaster while her uncle stared at the large display screen that dominated the far wall.  A map of the continent was on display with little information pins over various points of tactical interest.

 

“Unseen Blessing, Governor General,” Naz replied warmly, dipping into a curtsy that was probably not appropriate military discipline.

 

_‘It’s not.  You’re supposed to salute,’_ Miya clarified.  The fact that Miya knew meant that Naz knew it too, but it was Miya’s instinct that brought that knowledge to the surface of their consciousness.  Military protocol would never be instinctual for Naz.

 

“So,” Wasseim broke into the greeting with a cheerful smile, pretending to be oblivious to the tension in the air in an attempt to break it up.  “GovGen ‘n I want you ‘n Titan to consider hittin’ a River metal refinery. We’re tryin’ to send a message t’ the Hallucians. Let ‘em know what Titan’s capable of.”

 

“You heard of the recent incident, I assume?” Himiko asked, shooting a cold look at Naz and completely ignoring her uncle’s diatribe.

 

“Heard shooting... Important?” Naz asked, remembering that there had been a bit of an uproar late yesterday.  They’d been on patrol in Titan but there’d been too much confusion over the comm channels and nobody had given them specific instructions.  There’d been rumours and speculation amongst the rank and file when Miya had brought the machine in to dock, but nothing consistent

 

“You should have been briefed on that,” Himiko scowled, shooting a look at Wasseim.

 

“Didn’ label ‘er ‘datory fer pilots.  Naz’ in ‘er rights t’skip it.” Wasseim took a seat across from Himiko and fiddled with his hand terminal, making a few minor adjustments to the display on the wall.  He played up his slang a bit, probably to provoke Himiko’s ire onto him and off of her.

 

“Well, this is our response,” Himiko said, shooting another distasteful look at Wasseim, taking his bait.  “I want you to send a resounding message, one that undermines faith in the Hallu’s military.”

 

“So we’re to leave the precursors’ sad little creations as a pile of molten scrap and dust?” Miya asked, her interest piqued at the prospect of combat.  She took over and straightened up her posture, letting a little grin creep onto her face.

 

Himiko’s brow furrowed a little at that.  She was clearly uncomfortable with Nazmiya’s duality.  Seeing Miya come out the way she just had had clearly perturbed her.

 

“S’the idea.” Wasseim confirmed, slurring together his first two words until it was almost a hiss.  This time, Himiko kept scowling at Miya, not taking her uncle’s bait.

 

“Let us off the leash, give us permission to fully engage and we’ll get it done,” Miya grinned wider, ignoring the tension.  She hated rationing ammunition and fuel rods for the reactor. Besides, she enjoyed getting under the Governor General’s skin a bit.

 

“We shall assess,” Naz interrupted, retaking control and settling into a more relaxed, serene posture.  “Miya, correct. Untether us?”

 

“Ye, ye.  restrictions lifted, ay GovGen?” Wasseim sent her the files containing the scouting reports on the mining operation that he wanted them to attack.  The information appeared on their hand terminal and the two of them started to look through it as their uncle and Himiko exchanged looks.

 

Nazmiya studied the files and scouting reports intently, analyzing the outpost’s defenses and various means of defending itself and its means of calling for reinforcements.  Talon was the dominant autonomous network on the planet, and its ability to reinforce facilities was far more impressive than River’s. Still, River had some significant holdings on the northern part of the continent, near the Gate controlled by the Federation of Hallucia.  Reinforcements would be aerial, flying drones most likely but perhaps a medium troop carrier. Nazmiya made a point in their notes about stocking Titan’s extra stores with anti-air missiles. The two of them worked in tandem, tasks like this required their expertise and experience, not their individual personalities.

 

_“Across the network…”_ Naz mused silently.  She thought of the vast network of Gates that connected the precursor’s planets to one another.  The network itself spanned hundreds of worlds at least, though only two dozen had been colonized by humanity before the machines had awoken and the Bereaver had closed off the Gate to Earth.  ExSol society only spanned fourteen worlds now, worlds that Himiko probably had aspirations towards.

 

_“Definitely.  Himiko would never be satisfied with just Abrandia.  Now that she has Titan, and us, she sees what is possible.”_ Miya didn’t share Naz’ reservations with their role in an Imperial venture in a moral sense.  She didn’t care for it only because she wasn’t sure how starting armed conflicts benefitted the two of them specifically.

 

_“...Perhaps… fail the mission?”_ Naz floated the idea.

 

_“We can’t.  They already think we’re crazy.  Unreliable. Uncontrollable. This is a tune we should dance to, Naz.”_

 

_“Titan useless, without us.  Only our song, sufficient.”_

 

_“That only protects us so much, along with our uncle’s sentimentality.  I don’t doubt that the Governor General is searching for a way to replace us with someone else.  See the way she looks at us?”_

 

Nazmiya didn’t fight and argue over their conflicting ideas.  Instead, the two trains of thought collided with one another, impressed themselves upon one another, and Naz’ will simply… took precedence.  Miya grumbled slightly as she was defeated, but accepted the loss without further contestation. The two of them didn’t, and couldn’t exist or function without the ability to resolve their conflicts decisively.

 

Nazmiya’s Tempest fluctuated at the conclusion of the disagreement.  Their hand terminal was special-made and had no magnetic parts in it, but two others on the table nearby weren’t made for someone with Nazmiya’s rare Ascension.  The fluctuation created a wave of magnetism that pushed on the metal parts in the other terminals, sending them skidding across the table to clatter onto the floor.  One of the lights in the room flickered slightly at the same time, and Wasseim’s chatter cut out for a second as the eyes in the room looked towards them.

 

“...Apologies.” Naz murmured softly.

 

“Anyway…” Wasseim continued, clearing his throat and grabbing Himiko’s attention away from Nazmiya.  Much as people were aware that Tempest was a sporadic and inconvenient Ascension, it was still disconcerting for people when Nazmiya involuntarily threw metal objects around the room as though they were possessed.

 

The two of them continued to work and Wasseim and Himiko continued bickering about a few small details.  They submitted a mission profile to their Uncle within minutes, omitting the request for an extra rack of anti-air missiles.  It would be simple enough to over deploy the stockpile that Titan normally carried and then retreat when radar picked up incoming airborne reinforcements.  The mission would be an embarrassment to Abrandia, and Miya could avoid putting the two of them in any real danger. With luck, perhaps the blame for the embarrassment would fall upon someone else, but that didn’t matter.  Naz had no care for what the Governor General thought of her, and Miya only cared because it might be an inconvenience.

 

“...Fine, just use your judgement, Knight Major,” Himiko raised her voice a little as she stood up.  She looked over at Naz one last time before leaving, a trail of frigid air seeming to linger behind her.  Wasseim exhaled through his teeth as she left, and then slowly plodded over to Naz and sat down on the table next to her.

 

“Y’allright, Naz?” he asked.

 

“...Fine, Uncle.” Naz replied, putting her terminal down and looking up at him curiously.

 

“Still gettin’ that cough?”  Even as he asked, Naz did notice a shortness of breath, a constriction in their chest.  It was never completely beyond their notice, but also persistent enough that they often forgot about it.

 

“We are,” Naz nodded and looked up at him purposefully.  The city hadn’t had access to the cystic fibrosis medication Nazmiya needed for over a month now.

 

“We’ll get yer meds.  Chem shipment should be comin’ in soon.” Wasseim scowled a little, and shook his head.  Naz knew there was very little her uncle could do to get shipments safely through the Gate network and it frustrated him much more than it frustrated her or Miya.  Wasseim looked down at his terminal and tapped a few buttons in the following silence. Naz’ terminal beeped softly and she looked down to see that their uncle had approved their assessment of the mission, shortage of missiles and all.

 

_“No wheels of Empire, turn.  Our gaze, freezing, petrifying.”_ Naz smiled a little bit, more for Miya’s sake than for their uncle’s bit it seemed to relieve him a little anyway.

 

_“Let’s just hope it doesn’t blow back onto us.”_

 

_“Tempest’s song will guide… Have faith.”_

 

***

 

Nina pushed open the door of the med bay with a bundle of clothes fresh out of the 3d printer under her arm.  Dawn was sitting up in the bed that had been set up for them in the med bay, reading something on their hand terminal.  Dawn had been in bed for a few days and the ghost of stubble was beginning to show across their scalp and brows. When Nina tossed the bundle of clothes to them, Dawn eagerly sifted through it and pulled out the binder they’d ordered.  The binder they’d been wearing to compress their chest had been ruined by both the bullet hole and the auto-doc cutting it open to perform surgery. They’d been self-consciously covering themselves with a blanket since recycling the tattered garment in a truly compulsive manner.

 

Dawn’s eyes shone with relief as they looked at the newly fabricated piece of clothing but then immediately shot a distrusting look at Nina.  She rolled her eyes and turned around, letting Dawn struggle and squirm into the binder without staring at them. Dawn was extremely strange but dysphoria was something Nina understood well enough.  Some kind of bodily dysphoria was extraordinarily common amongst ExSols born with an Ascension, and Nina was no exception, having undergone a gender transition herself.

 

“Thank you, Miss.  This one is not exceptionally comfortable in their own skin.” Dawn explained quietly.

 

“Ye.  I’ve got Pulse, m’self.  I know the feelin’.” Nina turned around to see Dawn stretching and throwing the blanket aside, a warm redness shining just under their skin indicating that Dawn was letting their Zenith burn at a low simmer.  Sam hadn’t made Dawn wear a sedative brace on their arm which would allow them to incapacitate the pilot remotely, but they _had_ moved Dusk and put docking clamps on the Mech that would keep it grounded.  Such medical braces were usually last-ditch resorts, as the Autonomous Networks sometimes forced their way into remote-controlled electronics and took control of them.

 

“Dawn’s task upon this world has gone quite awry, but all is not lost. This one seeks to make a surgical strike into the depths of the Talon fortress.  Assistance was never sought, but it could be of use. There is a specific piece of hardware that Dawn has been charged with retrieving, but there will be other riches that this one is happy to relinquish.”

 

“An’ you want me to convince Sam and ‘rina that it’s worth it to attack the fortress itself, eh?” Nina asked, eyebrow raised skeptically.

 

“Dawn thinks that Miss Sahara has a greater appreciation for what is possible than her compatriots,” they answered calmly.

 

“You mean I’m reckless ‘n crazy,” Nina snorted.

 

“Dawn is sure some would say that.  Dawn would say that Miss Sahara understands that the lives of the Bereaved are fraught by nature.  Safety upon the precursor’s worlds is a cruel illusion compared to what our cousins on Earth enjoy.”

 

Nina was legitimately a little taken aback by Dawn’s words.  Cursing ‘The Bereaver,’ the Prime Minister of the Earth Coalition who had closed the Earth gate off from the network generations ago was common enough parlance, even if it was considered very inappropriate.  Dawn’s explicit naming of the Extra Solar colonies and peoples as ‘The Bereaved’ carried a certain level of solemn sacrilege that made Nina’s own casual profanity seem tame. An alarm rang throughout the facility before she could respond, and before Nina could even reach for her hand terminal, the ground shook violently as an explosion roared outside.

 

“The heck?” Nina grumbled, pulling out her hand terminal.  The words **_Uder Attack.  Get to safeyr_ **were on her screen, typo’d in haste.  Nina’s brain raced. Carrina was asleep, so Twinshya wouldn’t be in action, but the outpost’s automated defenses had always been more than sufficient to chase off reclaimers like Widows and the like.  Talon or even River had never launched an all-out attack on their facility, they never would, they had no reason to. The outpost was of minimal strategic and material value.

 

“Miss Sahara,” Dawn gently put a hand on Nina’s arm and she looked at them with fear surging through her.  “Let Dawn get to Dusk. This one can repel the attackers.”

 

“What? No, the auto defences can—” Another loud rumble cut Nina off as the building shook.  The sound of metal ripping and masonry crumbling was unmistakable and Nina almost lost her footing.  “Heck. Come with me.”

 

Nina grabbed Dawn and ran out of the medical bay towards the nearest door.  Smoke billowed in the hallway and Nina had to cover her mouth so that she didn’t trigger an asthma attack. Squeezing her eyes shut and holding her breath, Nina bolted through the hallway and kicked a door outside off its hinges.  She charged out, exhaling through her nostrils with her eyes burning and tearing up. She looked up, hoping to see whatever it was that was tangling with their automated defenses that had gotten a stray shot off.

 

Nina froze in a moment of complete and utter cognitive dissonance.

 

A thirteen meter tall and twenty meter long walker robot was methodically climbing the hill that housed their camp.  Nina had only seen videos of assault robots of that size, read about them, looked at mockups of what their schematics might be like.  They existed on worlds that were the precursor’s battlefields, ones that ExSols stayed far away from, for there was no safe haven like Abrandia to be found.  Ishtar was a Talon stronghold, a manufacturing and resource center for the autonomous network. Gigantic assault machines like the Colossus Tick before her shouldn’t be here, not according to everything that ExSols knew about the precursors.  But it was, and it was _attacking_ their camp.

 

A barrage of sequential plasma caster fire so dense it was almost like an iridescent whip of light streaking across the sky tore into the middle of their compound.  The entire structure buckled and the top two floors collapsed in on itself with a hellish shriek of melting and breaking metal. Nina was so transfixed and horrified that she just stared at the machine and didn’t notice Dawn tugging on her arm until the enby yanked so hard they made her stumble towards them.

 

“...dock.  This one can lure…”  Dawn was yelling at her but her ears were ringing and the roar of a detonating missile drowned out most of the words.  She heard them say dock, though, and nodded, following them, running towards the rear of the camp where Dusk and Twinshya were waiting.

 

The dock was mostly intact, say for a bit of the roof that was collapsed in the corner.  Ryan’s body was there, under the rubble, lying very still under the only bit of the roof that had actually collapsed.  Nina stared at him numbly before Dawn tugged on her arm again. “Please, Miss Sahara, this one needs you to release the docking clamps on Dusk.”

 

Nina nodded and went over to where Dusk was thoroughly locked in place with three separate clamps restraining the Mech’s legs, arms, and torso in a truly unnecessary act that Sam had insisted upon.  Nina went over and punched in the administrative override code into the clamps that she’d secretly installed into almost everything around this camp. With a hiss and a clank, they released, and Dawn wasted no time in nimbly climbing up into the cockpit in spite of their partially-healed injuries.  

 

Nina backed up slowly as Dusk rumbled to life even as a series of autocannon fire rattled through the building in a deadly cacophony that Nina wouldn’t even have noticed if she’d been unlucky enough to catch one of the rounds.  Dusk moved to one of the outer doors, moving with a nimbleness that made it look like a living thing and not a Mech. It paused there for a moment, and Dawn’s voice projected outwards.

 

“Dawn apologizes for the subterfuge, Miss Sahara, but Dusk would stand little chance at stopping that foe.” Their voice was almost the same tone that it always was, but Nina wondered if she detected a bit of sorrow in it, or maybe she was just having another panic attack.

 

“H-Hey! Can’t… leave…” Nina took several steps after Dusk’s retreating form, but before she could get close, Dusk vanished behind the shroud of its stealth field.  Nina stumbled, falling onto her knees where Dusk had been, staring at her hands as they made imprints in the dirt.

 

“Miss Sahara,” Dawn’s voice came again, from further away but not so far that Nina couldn’t have seen them if the stealth weren’t active.  “Dawn suggests that you pilot that other Mech. It will be destroyed if it remains sedentary, and your comrades are likely already deceased.”

 

“But… It’s ‘rina’s…”Nina looked up, wobbling onto her feet.  Dawn didn’t answer. Nina didn’t know if they could even hear, if they hadn’t already left.  Nina stared at Twinshya’s shadowed form in the corner, numb and dazed. She knew that she knew how to pilot the Mech, knew how to release the docking clamps and knew Carrina’s access codes to power it up.  It was there in her mind but right now she couldn’t recall any of it. Couldn’t even begin to fathom how she’d start the process.

 

Amidst the cacophonous roar of her home being torn apart, a high pitched squeak both cut through the noise and yet was distinctly out of place amidst such destruction.  Nina looked down, towards the open doorway, and saw her little grey kitten Jeffie crouched low on the floor, looking up at her with his tail tucked beneath him. The sight of the terrified kitten jolted her into action, her eyes went wide and she ran towards him, scooping him up into her arms.  He buried himself into her embrace, clinging tightly to her as she ran over and released the single docking clamp with her backdoor. She climbed into the cockpit that she knew so well but had never sat in. She grabbed the ventilator tube, and exhaled slowly to calm her nerves so that she didn’t gag and puke all over her poor furry passenger.  She fed the breathing tube down her trachea as quickly as she dared, eyes watering, gag reflex threatening to make her sick. She flicked the machine on, and was immediately ‘rewarded’ with the strange sensation of having a machine breathe for her. She strapped herself in, started Twinshya’s boot sequence, and turned on her Pulse.

 

Her anxiety, numbness and terror melted away instantly, replaced with a sense of power, of preparedness, confidence, and nigh-maniacal euphoria.  She would have cackled with glee if she didn’t have a tube down her throat, and her fingers darted to the controls with a confidence that _should_ come from piloting the glorious piece of technology that was Twinshya.  The Mech that she should _always_ have been the pilot of.  The Mech responded to her whim and loped out of the same door that Dusk had vanished through.  

 

Twinshya’s gait was a bit uneven, pushing off with the back leg, landing on its front two.  She burst out of the crumbling remnants of her home and her sensors lit up, analyzing the outline of the Colossus Tick, putting pins on its weapon systems and various other points of interest.  Her fingers darted to the comm systems, and she typed out a message in a wide broadcast.

 

_‘Nina here ridin Twinshya.  Whos alive? Ill come get ya.’_ She considered sending out an audio broadcast along with it, but speaking with a tube down her throat was a trick that she hadn’t learned yet.

 

She cut a wide path out of the building, keeping away from the Colossus Tick.  The massive robot made short work of their camp, finishing the job it started and reducing it to utter rubble.  No answer came on the comm. Dead silence. Nina entered Counter-Pulse, Twinshya shifting out of offense mode and into defence mode.  Along with it, her chest froze up and she ceased to be able to breathe under her own power. Her euphoria, too, faded, and Nina felt the crushing horror of what had just happened grip her once again.

 

Hands shaking, Nina piloted Twinshya away from the destruction of her home and colleagues without even thinking about what direction she was going in.  An alert lit up her screen and she looked over at it numbly. The readout for her deflectors had registered a high-temperature aversion. She frowned at it for a second, feeling like she knew what that meant, but it wasn’t quite coming to her.  Two more aversions showed up, and then one more appeared and blared bright red with an alert. Chassis damage. Realization hit her and she cursed internally, swapping to her rear cameras to see five four-legged walker robots chasing her and firing plasma casters at her.  Fleas, interception craft that would easily outpace Twinshya and attempt to detain her so that heavier pieces of machinery could be brought to bear.

 

Nina knew Twinshya better than Carrina did, she analyzed all of the combat data after the fact, and while she had never piloted it herself, she knew what to do.  Twinshya pivoted, pushing off with its front legs and pivoting on its back as it twisted its torso to face the side-mounted autocannons towards her attackers. She concaved the torso ever so slightly to tilt the two outer autocannons inward slightly and fired all three.  All three slugs converged upon the nearest attacker and struck simultaneously, tearing off two of legs and the mounting where the plasma caster was attached to the main body. Immediately afterwards she leapt forward to make herself a moving target, spinning the Mech around so that she could bring the cannons on the right side to bear while the left side ones reloaded and cooled down.  The enemy robots split up and tried to encircle her but she twisted Twinshya into position and fired. Autocannon four cracked, slug slamming into the body of one of the robots and sending it staggering backwards but not quite disabling it. Autocannons five and six threw up errors. Six had jammed and misfired, five had suffered a short circuit. Nina growled in frustration and just leapt forward again, trying to get behind a nearby cluster of rocks.

 

Plasma casters scored the ground and rocks around her as the pursuing robots gave chase and tried to encircle her.  She reoriented and fired cannons one through three at the first robot that jumped around the edge of the rocks after her. One of her slugs missed but the other two ripped into the torso of the machine and fried something vital enough to bring it down.  Another came around the right side and she did the minor adjustment she needed to fire autocannon four at the robot on the other side. Again, the single slug wasn’t quite enough to down her target but it did stop it from targeting her properly, its plasma caster went wide and burned a hole in the rock.  A trickle of magma rolled down the side of the stone, cooling and solidifying before it could reach the ground.

 

Nina felt her Pulse shift and become active again with an unmistakable viscerality that was as jolting as if she’d just been sprayed with freezing water.  She’d activated her Pulse many times before without the assistance of the ventilator but then always lost consciousness during the Counter-Pulse, so the sensation of transitioning from one to another in this way was new to her.  She paused for a moment in shock, not registering that she still had enemies shooting at her. Three plasma projectiles came in fast and the now-weakened deflectors only managed to avert one of them, and Twinshya’s diagnostics screeched and alerted her to the damage being done.  Without even looking at the damage reports, Nina aimed and fired the railgun. There was a deafening supersonic boom as the heavy tungsten slug was nigh-instantly accelerated to several times the speed of sound. The slug hit and obliterated Nina’s target like she’d just fired a pistol at an ant, continuing onward to send a forceful spray of dirt and soil into the air.

 

In spite of the circumstances, Nina couldn’t help but find herself grinning around her breathing tube at the obscene act of overkill.  Some part of her knew the euphoria was getting to her but she didn’t dwell on that. Nina being in Pulse put Twinshya into offense mode and allowed her to bring not just the main cannon to bear but also the high-intensity laser mounted on its back.  When the two damaged robots limped around the rocks after her, she was able to target lock them with the laser and burn holes in their flimsy frames. The stupid crummy laser overheated and shut down after only about six seconds of use but it was enough to melt through one robot’s leg and finish shearing off the weapon mounting of the other.  Her pursuit disabled, Nina wasted no time and didn’t let herself relax. She set Twinshya into a quick run down the hill towards Abrandia before reinforcements came, Fleas were always used by the autonomous network to harass and slow targets so that other machines could catch up and finish quarry off. She pushed the Mech as hard as she could, glancing at damage reports and wincing at the work she knew she’d have to do to fix them, praying that none of the damage would cause her to break down before she could get to safety.

 

***

 

_06:03 Butterfly:_ _Miss Nina? Are you alright?  What_

_happened when you went to see Dawn?_

 

_08:22 Butterfly:_ _Nina, I think the Militia just put out an alert_

_and warrant for your arrest, are you alright?_

 

_08:45 Butterfly:_ _They are definitely looking for you._ _If you_

_get this message, don’t come to Abrandia.  I hope you’re_

_okay._

 

_20:21 NinaS:_ _Talon just flattened our camp_

 

_20:30 Butterfly:_ _Huh???_

 

_20:31 NinaS:_ _Talon sent a colo tick._

 

_20:31 NinaS:_ _Everybody is dead._

 

_20:32 Butterfly:_ _Nina that’s not funny, I’m serious the militia_

_is looking for you._

 

_20:32 NinaS:_ _Not jokin_

 

_20:33 NinaS:_ _I took twinshya and barely got away_

 

_20:34 Butterfly:_ _You’re not kidding? Where are you?_

 

_20:34 NinaS:_ _Sending coords_

 

_***_

 

Miya drummed her nails on the ceramic mug of hot chocolate on the table in front of her as she cast glances about the room.  _SolSanna_ ’s was a nice enough little cafe that doubled as a community space.  She’d been forced to go and pursue her backup cruising plan when she’d spotted the clinger from a few nights ago at her normal spot.  _SolSanna_ ’s wasn’t quite as seedy as she’d thought it might be, which was both a blessing and a curse.  There were less gross people here than some of her normal spots, but she also felt a little out of place just going up to some of the boys here and asking them to fuck her.  There were a few cute looking guys, but both of them were at the same table, playing a roleplaying game with a small group of friends, talking softly and rolling dice. She didn’t doubt for a second that she had the ability to convince one of them to have a go at her, but breaking apart that group seemed like a pitifully desperate move, even for her.

 

“Havin’ a good day, ay?” an overly chatty waitress came up to Miya with a carafe of the hot chocolate she’d been sipping at and topped her off.  It seemed odd to Miya that she’d have a whole batch of the stuff pre-prepared. She didn’t care enough to ask, and when she gave the waitress a once-over, the quiet little femme-amorous aspect of her libido wasn’t piqued.

 

She grunted softly, not bothering to engage with the woman even a little.  She politely gave Miya her space, going off to tend to some other patrons.  

 

_“A lost venture, tonight?”_ Naz offered.

 

Miya didn’t answer with words, she just buzzed with annoyance and then started to think through the list of boys that would take her call.  A moment later, she pulled out their hand terminal and started to thumb through the list with an appropriate amount of hopelessness.

 

_“Can’t even fuck your girlfriend,”_ Miya finally responded, giving up on the list and tucking the hand terminal away.

 

_“Marielle’s fornication, mine~”_ Naz replied with a mental laugh, even though she knew what Miya meant.  Marielle was busy tonight, some horrifically boring sounding meeting with a bunch of her fellow tech designers.

 

_“I think I just want to go back and masturbate,”_ Miya grumbled, drinking half of her remaining hot chocolate in one go.

 

_“Self-pleasure, self-love, admir—”_ Naz began the thought but Miya cut her off by rising up to her feet. She dropped a few coins on the table as a tip for the waitress, and left the little cafe behind.  She took an immediate turn and left the plaza behind, heading down a footpath towards the city center. When she reached the first major branching path, she paused for a moment.  Going straight would take her to a train station, taking the turn would lead her through a residential area and eventually home. Both would get her there eventually, but going by foot would take a bit longer.  

 

They decided to walk.  Naz wanted the exercise, and Miya wanted to avoid the crowds.  Their thoughts eventually turned to the mission. Miya pulled out their hand terminal and started looking through the mission details as they walked through the quiet district, glancing up only to make sure she didn’t walk into anybody.  There was nothing much to see that she hadn’t already seen and considered. Given that the plan was to intentionally fail the mission, planning was a bit easier than it might otherwise have been. On a random thought, Miya went and pulled up weather reports for the area.  The refinery was pretty far up north, it would be cold, and Miya hated Titan’s heater, it blew hot air right on her face. She made a note to herself to wear proper warm wea—

 

A hand grabbed her around the stomach, catching her wrist on the opposite side and wrenching her sideways.  She opened her mouth to scream but a heavy cloth sack went overtop her head, muffling the noise. She immediately tried to kick at her assailants but someone caught the foot, and lifted it up off the ground, catching her other leg almost immediately afterwards.  The people, it was at least two of them, moved with a terrifying efficiency, slinging her struggling and writhing body between the two of them and quickly carrying her off in another direction. She tried to kick, thrash, or claw the kidnappers but her efforts were useless, and in less than a minute, they lifted her up and into something and a heavy metal door closed behind her.  A moment later, someone forced her wrists together and bound them. She tried to kick with all her strength, using the fact that she was now on some solid surface to gain some extra leverage. Blind as she was, all she did was kick some metallic wall and stub her toe. A moment later, they caught her legs, forced them together, and bound them just as they had her wrists. Defeated and disabled, Miya forced herself to calm down a little and not exhaust herself with useless fighting.  She’d been trained for this, she needed to pick her moment carefully, not fight constantly and keep them on-guard.

 

The ground, or whatever it was, vibrated and someone rolled her over so that she was face-down, keeping a hand on her back to steady her.  Miya started to count as the vehicle moved. She had an idea how to estimate how far away from the pick-up point they’d be, if they dumped her into some nondescript basement, she’d be able to guess where in the city she might be.  By her estimate, they drove for about twenty minutes, which meant they had to still be inside the city. The hand on her back grabbed her under the armpits, and another pair of hands grabbed her feet, lifting her up and out. She squirmed and struggled a little bit, testing her captors just a little, but they held her tight.  As she’d expected, they went down a flight of stairs into an air-conditioned interior space. She was positioned upright, standing precariously on bound legs. Her arms were raised, and she heard someone working. She tried moving her arms, but found that they’d been secured to something above her head. She tugged a little bit, but nothing moved in any serious way.  She heard people moving around, but nobody touched or interacted with her for several minutes.

 

Finally, a hand appeared on her stomach, and Miya noticed the contrast.  The people handling her had been rough, professional, dispassionate. The hand on her stomach was slow, deliberate, sexual.  “Pretty little kit I’ve got here, hmm?” a robotic voice rasped in her ear.

 

“Heck you!!” Miya shrieked, twisting about and thrashing against her bonds.  She furiously made an effort to headbutt her captor but didn’t connect with anything.

 

The robotic voice giggled, a strange garbled noise as it passed through the voice modifier.  “Sorry, Miya.” That gave her pause. It called her Miya? Their legal name was Nazmiya, what enemy of Abrandia would know them as Miya, not Naz, and not Nazmiya?

 

The hood came off abruptly, and Miya blinked against the harsh glare of the indoor lights.  Marielle was there, her biological arm still gently fondling their stomach while the heavy cloth bag was held in her robotic prosthetic hand.  She was wearing a tight leather corset that perfectly pushed up but didn’t conceal her breasts. Marielle tossed the bag onto the floor and reached over to a table covered in various instruments of sadism and selected a riding crop.

 

Miya’s rage flared for a moment, this was one of Naz’ stupid fetishes.  The rage only lasted for the briefest of moments before Naz took over, her eyes going wide.  Her Marielle had gone through all this for her! She was overjoyed.

 

“Miya will forgive,” Naz giggled, wriggling against her bondage.  Miya knew the truth of that statement, she couldn’t stay mad at her alter-ego.

 

Marielle swung her riding crop, the tip whistling through the air and expertly slapping one of Naz’ nipples.  She squealed loudly, twisting and trying to get away in vain. Marielle tsked disapprovingly. “Speak when spoken to, prisoner,” she asserted sternly, rubbing the rough tip of her crop against the sore nipple she’d just struck.

 

“Impossible acquiescence,” Naz murmured softly, glancing downward at her ankles.  They were bound together but not bound to anything else. Marielle smirked at her and tapped her riding crop steadily on Naz’ chest with a smirk.

 

“I’m not going to gag you, but—”  Naz shifted her weight onto the rope attached to her wrists and snapped her feet up, trying to kick Marielle in the stomach.  Marielle reacted in time, her robotic arm moving with inhuman speed and grabbing Naz’ ankles. The riding crop came down, brutally slapping one of Naz’ tits and then the other with practiced efficiency.  Naz cried out and tried to kick at Marielle some more but Marielle had a suite of cybernetic and biological modifications that would have made her much stronger, more reactive, and more dexterous than Naz even if Naz wasn’t tied up.  She laughed at Naz’ attempts to fight back, holding her ankles firmly with her robotic hand while she set down the riding crop and fetched some rope with the other. She expertly looped the rope through the ankle bindings and then let Naz go and stepped back.  Naz tried to loop her toes into the new length of rope to undo it but the angle was all wrong and she had no leverage.

 

Marielle carried the rope over to a hook somewhere else in the dungeon she’d had Naz brought to and started tying them together.  A moment later, she started to pull the slack out, lifting Naz’ bound legs off the floor and suspending her in the air. She kept working, looping a sling around her back and attaching that rope to the ceiling to alleviate some of the pressure on her ankles and wrists, deftly avoiding and mitigating Naz’ attempts to kick, claw, and bite her.  As a final move, she separated Naz’ legs, tying them at a splayed angle that left her pussy vulnerable.

 

“There we go,” Marielle said in a sweet, sing-song voice, selecting a knife off of her table of toys and running her metallic finger down the edge of it.  It was an old design, probably a relic from Earth with no tech or safety features at all, just a gleaming steel blade with a metal handle. She used three quick slices of the knife to remove Naz’ top, the cheap, mass-produced cloth falling to the ground and leaving Naz naked except for her bra and several bits of rope that were holding her up.  She stared at Marielle intently for this part, not struggling or squirming. She knew that even if she tried to hurt herself on the blade, Marielle probably had enough of an enhanced reaction speed to keep her from harm. Seemed pretty ridiculous to struggle, either way. Marielle’s blade found the center part of Naz’ bra next, and with a small tug, the keen steel blade severed the flimsy wire holding Naz’ underwear together.

 

“Such pretty udders on you,” Marielle cooed, squeezing one of Naz’ prominent breasts with her robotic hand.  Naz gasped in pain, Marielle’s prosthetic delivering a vice-like crush as it squeezed her flesh. Naz tried to pull away in vain and met Marielle’s gleeful eyes with a look of defiance.  “Still wanting to struggle, huh? Well, struggling won’t stop me from fucking that sweet pussy of yours until you scream.”

 

“Uncoerced,” Naz said coldly, staring at Marielle.

 

Marielle just laughed and moved around to Naz’ skirt, cutting it and her panties off it even more easily than she had her top.  Naz was left almost completely naked, helpless, and suspended in the air a little over knee-height. She grabbed her riding crop again and started drumming it softly against Naz’ left thigh.  “How long do you think it will take me to break you?” she mused.

 

“Eternity.”

 

The riding crop swished loudly through the air and slapped her thigh.  Naz hissed angrily and twisted in her bondage, not moving with any real intent other than to not be a stationary target.  Marielle barely flinched at her diversion, taking aim again and slapping her just as hard and accurately right next to the first spot.  Naz kept trying but Marielle continued to strike her with the crop as though Naz was frozen in time, using a combination of her extensive experience and her enhanced hand-eye coordination.  After the fifth strike, Naz howled in pain and snarled at Marielle, swinging herself to the side to try and get close enough to bite at her. Marielle just side-stepped around her effortlessly and pressed the pointer finger of her robotic hand into the meaty portion of Naz’ right thigh.  She paused for a moment, looking Naz right in the eye.

 

The sharp pain of an electric shock hit Naz and she screamed, her body twitching involuntarily.  Marielle laughed and pressed her finger into another part of Naz’ thigh closer to her pussy and shocked her again.  Naz howled louder, her pathetic attempts to thrash and get away from Marielle’s hand having even less success than her attempts to ruin her aim with the riding crop.

 

“Does my prisoner not like that?” Marielle laughed gleefully, shocking her again, this time much closer to her pussy.  Naz didn’t reply verbally, she was a nigh-feral mess of impotent anger, growling and snarling at her tormentor. “Well, too bad, I have a fully-charged battery tonight.”  Marielle pressed her finger into Naz’ clitoral hood, and paused, making eye contact with her with a sinister grin spreading across her face.

 

“Dare not…” Naz hissed.

 

Instead of shocking her, Marielle’s finger started to vibrate, and Naz gasped at the sudden pleasure blooming through her.  She held the agonizingly powerful vibration in place, doing tiny circles that had Naz moaning and undulating to the sensation.  The stimulation was forceful and she felt herself nearing an orgasm. She gasped and tried to wriggle away from the finger but it was a total impossibility, Marielle chased her and kept the pressure up, pushing her, pushing her…

 

She stopped, and Naz howled in rage, snarling ferociously at Marielle as her release was denied.  Naz wasn’t sure if Marielle’s ability to edge her so perfectly, to pull away at the most frustrating possible moment was due to some technology in her hand or if she just knew Naz’ body that well.

 

“You’re only going to cum if I let you, prisoner,” Marielle laughed, pressing her finger into another part of Naz’ labia and shocking her.  Naz screamed again at the intense pain. She tried to squeeze her thighs together to alleviate the agony but Marielle was in between her thighs and she couldn’t fight the stronger woman with just her bound legs.

 

“Ugh, this is getting so uncomfortable…” Marielle murmured, adjusting her leather miniskirt.  She moved around to Naz’ side and then stepped over her suspended form, straddling her. She lowered her weight down a little, sitting gently on Naz’ stomach.  She could feel the wetness already there, Marielle’s excitement making a little puddle on her stomach. She unbuckled her skirt and let it slide off, landing on the floor with a clank.  Her clit was already bulging obscenely from its hood, several inches of it extending down and almost touching Naz’ stomach. Marielle exhaled softly, her eyes fluttering. Naz didn’t quite know how Marielle controlled her various enhancements, but she recognized the look on her face when she did so.  Her clit swelled with blood, pulsing and hardening. More of it slid out of its sheath, draping across Naz’ stomach, heavy and wet. Marielle moaned softly as the prehensile appendage that had once been her clit swelled with blood and took on a life of its own. The biologically modified organ writhed and wriggled its way into the crevice between Naz’ breasts.  With a soft hum, Marielle brought her hands to Naz’ tits and squished them together roughly, creating a tunnel for her to fuck.

 

Naz twisted in her bonds, trying to shake Marielle’s grip on her breasts as she started to thrust her pseudocock through them but between her lack of leverage and Marielle’s inhuman strength she stood no chance at stopping her Mistress.  Marielle thrust her hips forward, the weight of her movement making Naz rock and and forth in her bondage. Her pseudocock slipped through the other side of Naz’ tits and bumped her in the chin. With a snarl, Naz whipped her head down, teeth flashing as she tried to bite the organ violating her.  She missed, and Marielle laughed cruelly as she repositioned herself.

 

“You’re very lucky you missed, prisoner,” Marielle snickered, tightening her grip on Naz’ tits and squishing them together so hard that it started to hurt.  She continued to gently rock her hips against Naz’ cleavage, the wet pseudocock smearing its lubricant everywhere as she did so. Before long, lewd slurping sounds filled the dungeon to accompany Marielle’s soft feminine moans.  Naz felt Marielle’s pussy absolutely _drip_ excess wetness onto her stomach.  It pooled heavily and trickled down towards Naz’ own cunt and she shivered even as she continued to struggle.  Marielle’s hands were squeezing _so hard_.  Naz saw the fat of her breasts squeezed and obscenely bulging around the tiny gaps in Marielle’s fingers.  The abused flesh was starting to turn a deep red as she kept up her relentless inhuman pressure on them.

 

“Fuck,” Marielle gasped, shuddering and panting orgasmically as her fucking motions took on a bit of an erratic pace.  Her entire body shuddered except for the mechanical arm as she rode out her orgasm, still lazily sawing her pseudocock through the makeshift pussy she’d made out of Naz’ chest.  “Oooohhh…” she sighed as she finished, leaning forward and resting her bio arm on Naz’ shoulder. Her response was immediate, pivoting her neck to sink her teeth into Marielle’s forearm and biting down as hard as she could.

 

“Ow!” Marielle cried out and twisted her arm a bit, before wrenching it free with an impossibly powerful motion that made Naz wince and her jaw ache.  Naz looked at the small trickle of blood running down Marielle’s arm with a sort of feral pride. Marielle looked at it too and laughed. “Cunt,” she snickered, and then grabbed both of Naz’ nipples and _twisted._

 

Naz screamed at the brutal treatment but Marielle didn’t relent.  Her nipples were stretched and wrenched until it felt like the skin would tear.  Naz cried and tried to pull free but accomplished nothing. She heard Marielle’s sinister laugh even as she whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut.  “Aw… is my little prisoner broken?” she snickered.

 

Naz cried and sniffled softly, nodding her head.  Marielle cocked an eyebrow at her, and dipped her biological fingers into the mess of her own fluids coating Naz’ bruised breasts.  She coated them in her own lubricant and then brought two fingers up to Naz’ lips with a smirk. Naz pouted, sniffled, and opened her mouth obediently to let Marielle finger fuck her orally.  The resistance in her was broken, the tiny instinct in her telling her to bite down on Marielle’s digits remembered too strongly the stinging pain still in her chest. Marielle grinned in triumph and power as Naz relented before her and gently sucked her fingers.

 

Satisfied, Marielle withdrew her fingers and stepped to the side so that she wasn’t straddling her anymore.  A blade popped out of her robotic hand and she sliced through the ropes keeping her suspended by her legs. She gently set Naz down, keeping her steady with her other hand.  Naz successfully stood on her own for a little over a quarter of a second and then her legs gave out. Marielle caught her again, letting her slide down to sit on the floor with her back to the cross.

 

“Are you going to be a good girl if I untie your wrists?” she asked, her voice stern but caring.  Naz sobbed softly and nodded, curling her knees up to her chest. Marielle sliced those ropes too and then unwound the rest.  Naz flexed her fingers, working out the kinks in them as she continued to curl up upon herself. Marielle slipped her arms underneath Naz’ back and into the crook of her knees and lifted her up.  Naz just whined softly, letting the stronger woman carry her like she was an infant. Marielle leaned forward, a tiny satisfied smirk on her face.

 

“Do you want to wind down now, or do you want to fuck first, little one?” she whispered.

 

Naz squirmed a little, feeling her surging, unfulfilled horniness.  She looked up at Marielle, meeting her eyes. She glanced down at her vagina, and then back again, and then nodded.

 

“Is that option two?” Marielle asked with a tiny laugh.  Naz nodded, and Marielle raised an eyebrow at the gesture.  “No words for me?” Naz pouted a little and bit her lip. She shook her head, and then once again looked down at her crotch, squirming needily.  Marielle leaned in, kissing Naz gently on the forehead, then trailing down to kiss her on the lips as well. Marielle barely moved otherwise, but a moment later, Naz felt the tip of Marielle’s pseudocock at the entrance to her pussy.  It wriggled its way inside her like a snake, and she let out a little squeak as it started to penetrate her fully. Marielle exhaled softly, enjoying the coupling even as she stood perfectly still and held Naz steady.  

 

Naz’ eyes fluttered and she twitched in Marielle’s impossibly strong grasp.  Marielle forced another several inches of her massive pseudocock inside her and she squeaked as it filled her to what felt like capacity.  It folded in on itself a little bit until it felt like a twitching undulating fist inside her. Her mouth moved wordlessly, vision swimming as she went into orgasm mode.  She went completely limp in Marielle’s arms and squeezed her eyes shut as the mass of flesh inside her rocked her body over and over again.

 

Marielle’s lips gently kissed Naz’ exposed neck, her own breathing ragged and irregular as she gently thrust and undulated her pseudocock inside Naz’ overwhelmed pussy.  Naz rode the orgasm for what seemed like forever, another wave of overwhelming pleasure washing over her just as the previous one ebbed. Marielle herself was relentless, pushing Naz’ limits and stimulating her out of her mind.  Eventually, it became too much, the stretching was starting to ache. She was exhausted, she was overstimulated. Her arms numb and weak, she raised a hand with a pinky pointed at the ceiling in a colossal effort.

 

“...mmmmm…” Marielle moaned softly, sounding like she was riding her own high.  Slowly though, her pseudocock started to slide out of Naz’ abused and stretched pussy.  It came free with a slimy pop and a trickle of both of their natural lubricants. Marielle carried the two of them through the building, though Naz eyes were unfocused and she was drifting on an orgasmic cloud.  Marielle laid her down on a mattress, and Naz curled up into a little ball. Marielle moved around the room a little bit, and then later, laid down on the mattress with her so that the two could drift off to sleep.

  
  
  
  



End file.
